Now not to be his fanboy or his stan or a** kisser/d*** sucker but I always thought that he was the coolest/humblest person in our community. CEOs @Jason_Igwe_Njoku and CEOs @mark take the time out of their busy schedule to reply to us as well but @PapaOlabode adds way more value to the community by replying back and creating new topics. N I’m yet to see him cyberbully anyone unlike some of us. Hopefully, that won’t change. Although I never agreed with him on this topic, I still think the he has golden heart online. IRL (In Real Life), I’m yet to meet him. Sorry for the grammar by the way, I’m in a rush.
But still he had many great points. The two that stood out were:
Lack of Internet Connection
Technological/Design Challenges
For the first point I think we can use SMS/USSD or wait till the telecoms get their act right but for the second point I thought that wouldn’t it be interesting if we could make the internet/web in our native languages? Like for those who don’t understand English? Whether by speaking/writing?
This is really funny, thx! BTW, @davidsmith8900 you praised me no be small o! If you didn’t mention that I was so humble, I would have said ‘no worries, once I have an official supporters club, you’ll be the first to get forms’.
This would open up it’s own can of worms. How many people can read/write in the native tongues, even if they are fluent speakers?
Another serious challenge that’s waiting to bite anyone in the derrière is that many of our languages are not written the way they’re spoken/pronounced.
While it might be an interesting idea, you might just find yourself spending most of your time tackling linguistic problems, instead of the problem(s) your startup set out to solve.
As regards creating services in our native languages I guess it’s something that will really take a lot of time to execute if one is trying to do this alongside creating the said service. However, I think the guys at Yorubaname are laying a solid foundation of what I see as a future resourceful digital database of the major native languages, which will develop, if continuously sustained for the long term, into iterations such as:
a comprehensive library of every possible phrase, clause and sentence for a particular major language in Nigeria
Digital voice-based rendition of such comprehensive library
And all of this could be packaged into an API which can be plugged into any platform to generate a native language version option for that platform.
Maybe then, 20 to 30 years from now, when internet penetration would have become much deeper in the country and data now as cheap as sachet water, we will have voice-based digital assistants in native languages on our mobile phones, in our homes and offices; and maybe, also, we’ll have Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa chatbots, called Chidi, Bisi and Adamu on e-commerce platforms like Konga and so on trying to convince us to buy some items based on previous search/shopping history. Then players like Google will likely come knocking on the Yorubaname guys’ doors for partnership to integrate it into their platforms too.
So keep building your stuffs and hope that Yorubaname and possibly others, solely dedicated to digitizing our native languages, follow this path of predictions to breathe digital life into our native languages.
@PapaOlabode, no problem my brotha. @ukay, I never thought of that. Thanks for opening my mind on that one. I’ll need to do more research. @Okaychukwu, I definitely like your ideas and suggestions. I’ll need to look into what you and @ukay mentioned. I never knew it could be so challenging.
on e-commerce platforms like Konga and so on trying to convince us to buy some items based on previous search/shopping history. Then players like Google will likely come knocking on the Yorubaname guys’ doors for partnership to integrate it into their platforms too.