Dear DEV Community,
It feels great to be here, and thank you for the opportunity to be a part of this platform!
This is my first post, and I am thrilled to share a recent project that kept me working late into the night. It is codenamed Murya, which literally means "Voice" in Hausa, one of Africa's most widely spoken languages, with over 95 million speakers worldwide.
To my knowledge, Murya (https://app.murya.ng) is the first publicly available, MIT-licensed text-to-speech (TTS) project created by a native Hausa speaker. Mainstream media and major tech corporations often treat Hausa and hundreds of other languages from the Global South as "low resource." However, I strongly believe this framing is not entirely accurate; rather, it is socially constructed.
Leading scholars and institutions have extensively explored the very problem Murya aims to solve, including:
- Human-Centered AI at Stanford University
- Masakhane, an NLP community focused on African languages
The takeaway is simple: if there is a will to address these gaps, there is a way—or rather, many ways—to make it happen.
Recently, Murya surpassed 10,000 page views in its first month, according to Cloudflare analytics. I also wrote about the release on LinkedIn.
Please feel free to ask questions, contribute, or learn more about Murya over on Hugging Face.
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