Introducing Murya AI

A developer has released Murya, an MIT-licensed text-to-speech project for Hausa, one of Africa's most widely spoken languages. The project, which surpassed 10,000 page views in its first month, aims to address the underrepresentation of low-resource languages in AI. The developer argues that the 'low-resource' label is socially constructed and hopes to inspire similar efforts.

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 https://murya.ng , 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: 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 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adamudanjuma speechai-nlp-lowresourcelanguages-activity-7491001204521553920-y9IW . Please feel free to ask questions, contribute, or learn more about Murya over on Hugging Face https://huggingface.co/adab-tech/murya-piper-hausa-tts .