Speech recognition
Transcribes spoken Baoulé, phone calls included, in the modern spelling.
Abidjan · Voice technology
Digital services,
in your language,
out loud.
We build speech recognition, speech synthesis and translation for Baoulé, and then for the other languages of Côte d'Ivoire.
A real example, spoken on a phone
Heard · Baoulé
An bla be wa di like.
Translated · French
Venez manger.
(“Come and eat.”)
About 0.7 s from voice to translated text, on our server.
Three building blocks, one conversation
Each works on its own or together: listen, understand, answer out loud.
Speech synthesis
A Baoulé voice to read text aloud or answer, for people who understand the language better than they read it.
Translation
From Baoulé to French and back, in an everyday, storytelling or Bible register; English through French.
What the machine hears
The relief is the sound. For each moment (left to right) and each frequency (low to high), the height shows the energy picked up by the microphone.
The ochre line is the tones. Baoulé is a tone language: the rise and fall of the voice is part of the words. A tool that follows only the letters loses part of the meaning.
The bands on the floor are the words, where the transcriber places them in time.
- Heard
- be a di like
- Recognised
- Bla di like.
- Translated
- Venez manger. (“Come and eat.”)
The ear alone hears “be a” where people say “bla”: the [bl] sound is short and soft. Our guide of checked phrases recognises the whole phrase and corrects it. That is why we record real voices: so the machine learns these nuances.
Measured results
Measured on 8 and 9 October 2026, on sentences and voices kept out of training.
10.3%character error rate
Transcribing speakers the model has never heard, recorded on phones.
34.7chrF++ Baoulé → French
Everyday texts (316 sentences). Higher is better.
34.1chrF++ French → Baoulé
Same test set, commercially usable model.
Our method
Real data, checked by people, and measurements on voices the models have never heard.
1. Gather
Bilingual books scanned and read by our OCR, public recordings with their text, then our own consented recordings.
2. Unify
One modern spelling: older texts are converted, and every conversion rule is measured.
3. Verify
Every audio clip is aligned with its text and scored; doubtful pairs are removed before training.
4. Measure
Test sets kept apart, confidence intervals, and our weak spots, published too.
Voix Baoulé programme
Do you speak Baoulé? Your voice counts, and it is paid.
By invitation, adults record short conversations with our Android app. Each approved session is paid 2,500 FCFA by mobile money.
18+
Adults only
2,500 F
Per approved session
Offline
The app records without a network
Consented
You choose, and you can withdraw
For developers
An HTTP API and a Python package, langchain-ivoire, to give your agents a Baoulé voice.
Documentation and API keyspip install langchain-ivoire
export IVOIRE_API_KEY=…
from langchain.chat_models import init_chat_model
from langchain_ivoire import with_language
chat = with_language(init_chat_model("…"), lang="bci")
chat.invoke("N tɛ, an ti sɛn?").content
# → an answer in BaouléAn Ivorian company
Abyshire Technology CI is a limited liability company (SARL) registered in Abidjan. We work with Baoulé speakers, proofreaders and families, and we pay for every contribution.
“I'm British. In 2020 I married a Baoulé woman, and I fell in love with all the cultures of Côte d'Ivoire — Baoulé culture and the Baoulé language above all. Abyshire Technology CI is my way of giving something back: bringing Baoulé, and then the country's other languages, into tomorrow's technology. So that everyone can use digital services in their own language, and businesses can speak to their customers in their mother tongue and give them the best possible experience. I bring more than twenty years of experience in IT to that aim.”
Baoulé is first of all a spoken language, at home, at the market, in the fields. Our tools start from the voice, not from writing.
- Based in Abidjan, close to the speakers.
- Every contribution paid, in FCFA, by mobile money.
- Consented, pseudonymised data, deleted on request.