An American-based international non-profit organization, Women in Voice, WiV, has awarded its diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, In Voice award to Dr. Omolabake Adenle.

WiV celebrates and amplifies women and gender diversity in voice technology around the world.

Adenle, a Nigerian American quantitative financial analyst, who won the award – which recognizes outstanding contributions to advance DEI in voice – “for making African languages accessible to voice solutions” had three other finalists in this category of the WiV awards.

Holder of a Ph.D. in Bayesian Signal Processing from Cambridge University, the founder/chief executive officer of Ajala Studios, which builds natural language and speech processing applications for under-resourced languages had in 2017 been a finalist in the 2017 Innovation Prize for Africa organized by the African Innovation Foundation, Vanguard reports.

Grateful for the WiV Award, she says it will help “contribute to the momentum needed to work towards making voice technologies accessible to all Africans” noting that “building a speech technology company that provides broad support of African languages is extremely challenging, (but) voice technologies will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of information and service access in Africa.”

It is her belief that “digitizing African languages will help make information more accessible to Africans.”

Formerly a vice president for quantitative and derivative strategies at Morgan Stanley in the United Kingdom, she started building African language-learning apps such as SpeakYorubaApp in her free time.