Founder’s Profile
Biography: Chukwuka Albert Okolie is a Nigerian AI engineer, data scientist, and entrepreneur, and the founder of 9jaLingo, a voice AI platform built to generate and transcribe natural-sounding speech in Nigerian languages, including Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Pidgin, and Nigerian-accented English.
He is a University of Benin graduate in Industrial Physics and has worked across machine learning, computer vision, NLP, and applied AI. Publicly, he publishes African-language speech datasets and models under the name Okolie Chukwuka (chukypedro), including 9jaLingo-labelled Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa datasets on Hugging Face.
Career & Leadership
Okolie founded 9jaLingo in 2025–2026 to close a gap in global voice systems that often fail on African tones, accents, and indigenous languages. Under his leadership, the company has built text-to-speech, speech-to-text, voice cloning, and developer APIs, with a library of 240+ African speaker voices and OpenAI-compatible endpoints for product teams.
Before 9jaLingo, he worked as an AI and machine learning engineer at companies including AirSmat, Indicina, Glodaris Technology, and NewWave Telecom & Technologies, and later as an AI & software engineer building voice-based telephony systems. His earlier career also included data analysis and business analytics roles in industry. He has led work on face recognition, credit decisioning models, agricultural computer vision, multi-agent LLM systems, and freelance AI products for international clients.
Vision and Impact
Okolie’s work centres on making African languages first-class in speech AI, so people can hear and be heard the way they actually speak.
His key focus areas include:
- Building authentic TTS and STT for Nigerian and African languages
- Preserving tone, accent, and regional speech patterns in AI voices
- Giving developers APIs and SDKs they can drop into apps, education, media, and customer support
- Expanding language coverage beyond Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and Pidgin
- Using locally collected speech data to train models that sound African, not generic
Through 9jaLingo, he continues to work on voice infrastructure designed for African users, creators, and developers.
Professional LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chukwuka-okolie-87609b181/
Also public:
Website: https://www.9jalingo.org
Portfolio: https://okoliechykwuka.github.io/portfolio/
GitHub: https://github.com/okoliechykwuka
Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/chukypedro
