Somewhere in Mabushi, a crossroad area between the inner and outer districts of Abuja, Nigeria, Uniccon Group, a two-year-old Nigerian technology firm, has built a humanoid: a 6-foot-tall multilingual human-like robot called Omeife. From an idea that was conceptualised in 2020 to a back-and-forth construction—slow wins and quick-succession learning—that stretched across two years, Omeife, built as a female Igbo character that understands and speaks eight different languages, is now a product ready to meet the world.
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Powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms developed in-house by the company’s team of scientists, Omeife has a deep understanding of African culture and behavioural patterns. Speaking to TechCabal about the project over a call, Chuks Ekwueme, who founded the company in 2020 and serves as its CEO, revealed that the humanoid also has a real time understanding of its environment including active listening and the ability to focus on a specific conversation thread as it’s happening.
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“It’s not just multilingual, it has the ability to switch languages and interact with specific gestures—hand illustrations, smile and other bodily gestures—that match the tone of the conversation,” said Ekwueme. [COLOR=rgb(184, 49, 47)]Omeife currently speaks English, French, Arabic, Kiswahili, Pidgin, Wazobia, Afrikaans, and of course, Igbo.
The way it works is that if those igbos discover or invent anything new in robotics or AI…it WILL be surely stolen from them when they try to patent it in US patent office.
Patent offices in poor countries are meaningless, there are many many europeans who have made big money from accessing poor countries patents and commercializing the inventions.
