Project · 2026
Kàddu
Speech AI for Wolof, measured in the open
An API that turns spoken Wolof into text and Wolof text into speech, with translation between Wolof, French and eight other languages. It runs open models on a CPU server, and every accuracy number on the site was measured on a public test set. A consented record-and-validate app collects new Wolof speech for the next model. Free during the preview.
What's interesting about it
- Benchmarked the open Wolof models on Google FLEURS (word and character error rates, speed) and serve the best one among commercially usable licences.
- FastAPI inference on CPU: XLS-R speech-to-text on ONNX Runtime int8, about a quarter faster than PyTorch at the same accuracy, SpeechT5 text-to-speech and NLLB-200 translation.
- Convex backend for API keys (stored hashed, daily quotas checked in one transaction), usage dashboards and the contribution flow; recordings go to private R2 storage through presigned URLs.
- The hero spectrogram is drawn live from the real audio with the Web Audio API.
- Next: distil several open Wolof models into one fast model, using their agreement on untranscribed radio audio as training labels.
