19/07/2026
Meet Saheed Azeez, the young man who built AI that Speaks Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa
Saheed Azeez is the creator of YarnGPT, a text-to-speech artificial intelligence model that is capable of translating English and other foreign languages into Nigerian accents and at least four indigenous languages, including Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba.
Azeez first drew attention in 2023 as the first runner-up at the Bluechip Data and AI Hackathon. In 2025, he finished building a text-to-speech model trained on an instinct for local authenticity. That model became YarnGPT.
Instead of relying on the clipped, generic-sounding adapters most TTS systems use, YarnGPT used pure language modelling to generate speech in a set of distinctly Nigerian voices and could dub an English-language video into Yoruba, Igbo, or Hausa within minutes. It could also turn a written news article into something closer to a podcast.
In June 2026, at the third edition of its own Data and AI Summit at Eko Hotel & Suites in Lagos, Bluechip Technologies, the pan-African IT firm co-founded by Olumide Soyombo and Kazeem Tewogbade, announced on stage that it had acquired YarnGPT outright.
Tewogbade later explained the logic plainly: Bluechip had been quietly trying to build its own internal tool for converting text into local dialects, and decided there was no point starting from zero when a working engine already existed.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but for an ecosystem more used to watching its brightest builders get scooped up by foreign accelerators, a homegrown hackathon project getting bought by a homegrown company was, by most accounts at the summit, exactly the kind of proof of concept Nigeria’s AI scene needed.
Source: Nairametrics
ℹ️Oyo News
