Alphabyte3:


While in school one lecturer said we should embark on hydroelectricity project to create it using the river at the back of the university to turn a turbine. He didn't even do a solid estimate. The cost was about N5m the next lecture he stopped because of funding.

FreeStuffsNG:

Awesome!

That's Faculty of Science, University of Lagos (UNILAG), at the background of his picture.

peleson1:


I think that is faculty of engineering instead at the background

MindHacker9009:
Good. Next University Electrical Engineers and their professors should create cheap 24 hours electricity from local materials.

GOFRONT:


Nice one......The sweetest side of a Male child.

Chaii.......Omoluabi.

Yoruba Amaka!!!

Our girls are on Tiktok, facebook reels and onlyfans disgracing us with their endless display of panties and towto related videos. Thats all their brain can process....... Saidaboj n co.......Tufiakwa

Alphabyte3:


While in school one lecturer said we should embark on hydroelectricity project to create it using the river at the back of the university to turn a turbine. He didn't even do a solid estimate. The cost was about N5m the next lecture he stopped because of funding.

TrackerSK:
Nice one brother,why others are still playing sporty bet

Ringstonermasks:
using a tool that any software engineer can utilise


to prove my point, i will build AshawoGPT... where u can build ur dream porn using the face of the gal that rejected ur toasting, u can build nd watch it and it will be watermarked to show its AI, so that enemies of progress will not use it to blackmail anyone. Give me 1 month.

OneOnland:
After creating 2 million GPT tokens, this UNILAG student has built an AI text-to-speech model with Nigerian accent

Azeez Saheed YarnGPT founder
In November 2024, when I asked Saheed Azeez how difficult it was to create Naijaweb — a dataset of 230 million GPT-2 tokens based on Nairaland — he brushed it off as something simple. "It's just web scraping," he said.

However, in my latest conversation with him, his new passion project seems to have pushed him further. He calls it YarnGPT, a text-to-speech AI model that can read text aloud in a Nigerian accent.

In a world where AI can generate lifelike voices in seconds, a text-to-speech model with a Nigerian accent might not seem groundbreaking at first. But when you consider two things, it becomes a big deal.

First, Azeez is a Nigerian university student with limited resources. Second, developing a model that accurately captures the nuances of a Nigerian accent is technically challenging.

From tokenising audio to the many mathematical concepts Azeez referenced while explaining the process, it was clear that this wasn’t a simple task. Even Azeez, in his usual fashion, didn’t downplay the effort involved.

"It was quite tasking, especially gathering the data needed to make this happen."

How YarnGPT was created
Inspired by naijaweb, Azeez was eager to build something new. "The amount of conversations and interest people had in Naijaweb was a great motivation. Imagine getting featured on Techpoint Africa; it motivated me to do this."

He was also motivated by failure. Before starting YarnGPT, he had applied for a job at a Nigerian AI company but didn’t perform as well in the interview as he had expected.

YarnGPT became the project that would help him improve his skills and increase his chances of securing such roles in the future.

Building an AI model that sounds Nigerian required gathering a vast amount of Nigerian voices.

"I used some movies that were available online. I extracted their audio and subtitles."

Nollywood produces over 2,500 movies a year, and with many filmmakers uploading their work to YouTube, it seemed like Azeez had plenty of data to work with. But in reality, he had almost none.

"The problem with building in Nigeria is data. Replicating what has been built overseas isn’t that hard, but data always gets in the way."

While there are thousands of movies for him to choose from the audio wasn't up to the standard he wanted, and their subtitles were inaccurate. To compensate, Azeez turned to Hugging Face, an open-source platform for machine learning and data science. He combined the audio from Nigerian movies with high-quality datasets from Hugging Face to train his model.

The next step was training the AI model, but without access to his own GPU, he had to rely on cloud computing services like Google Colab. This cost him $50 (₦80,000) — a significant amount for a university student. Unfortunately, it was a waste.

"The model I built wasn’t working well, and the $50 cloud credit was burnt just like that. It was painful for me."

Determined to find another way, he discovered Oute AI, a platform that had developed a text-to-speech model in an autoregressive manner.

"The way the model works is, you give it a piece of text, and it predicts one word at a time. It takes that word, adds it back to the text, then predicts the next one — kind of like how ChatGPT completes sentences. That’s what makes it autoregressive."

While I found the autoregressive framework difficult to understand, Azeez pointed out that it simply gave him better results.

Source:
https://techpoint.africa/2025/02/04/how-unilag-student-created-yarngpt-ai/

FreeStuffsNG:
Please take a look at that small rotunda at the background

OneOnland:
Nlf.p.mod, shouldn't we recognize our Yarngpt? It's open-source.

https://github.com/saheedniyi02/yarngpt

FreeStuffsNG:

Awesome!

That's Faculty of Science, University of Lagos (UNILAG), at the background of his picture.

lereinter:


Hydroelectric power

Which year was that?

TrackerSK:
Nice one brother,why others are still playing sporty bet