# Orinode

> Orinode is a Nigerian artificial intelligence company founded in 2026 by Usman Abubakar Aliyu in Lagos, Nigeria. The company develops automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) models for Hausa, Yorùbá, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin, and Nigerian English — including the natural code-switching that no global voice AI handles. Registered as Orinode Ltd (RC 9486856).

## What Orinode builds

- **Aria** — a production-ready voice assistant for Nigerian customer support, banking, and government services. Supports Hausa, Yorùbá, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin, and Nigerian English with natural intra-sentence code-switching.
- **Aria v1 (ASR)** — Whisper-large-v3 encoder + MLP adapter + Gemma-2-9b decoder + LoRA. Measured WER on 200 samples/lang (May 2026): English 10.9%, Hausa 31.1%, Yorùbá 29.5%, Igbo 39.8%, Pidgin 9.8%, Yorùbá–English code-switch 18.0%. Average 23.2%.
- **Aria Voices (TTS)** — CosyVoice 2 base voice with planned Nigerian-language fine-tuning (Q1–Q2 2026 studio recording).
- Open research releases on Hugging Face under [Orinode](https://huggingface.co/Orinode).

## Founder

Usman Abubakar Aliyu — Hausa-Fulani founder, Lagos. Studying Entrepreneurship at the British University in Egypt. Full-stack engineer turned ML researcher. Founder image: https://orinode.ai/assets/founder.jpg

## Key pages

- [Home](https://orinode.ai/) — full company overview, benchmarks, applications
- [Hausa speech recognition](https://orinode.ai/hausa-speech-recognition.html)
- [Yorùbá TTS](https://orinode.ai/yoruba-tts.html)
- [Igbo ASR](https://orinode.ai/igbo-asr.html)
- [Nigerian Pidgin ASR](https://orinode.ai/nigerian-pidgin-asr.html)
- [Nigerian English ASR](https://orinode.ai/nigerian-english-asr.html)
- [Ethics & responsible AI](https://orinode.ai/ethics.html)
- [Updates](https://orinode.ai/updates.html)
- [Privacy policy](https://orinode.ai/privacy.html)
- [Terms](https://orinode.ai/terms.html)

## Why Orinode exists

Global voice AI systems were trained primarily on American and British English. Hausa (≈70M speakers), Yorùbá (≈45M), Igbo (≈30M) and Nigerian Pidgin (≈75M) are an afterthought for every existing commercial voice AI. Orinode is purpose-built for these speakers — including the natural code-switching that defines real Nigerian speech.

## Contact

- Pilots: pilots@orinode.ai
- Research: research@orinode.ai
- Partnerships: partnerships@orinode.ai
- Press: press@orinode.ai

## Open-source

- GitHub: https://github.com/Orinode-ltd
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/Orinode (Capital O — case-sensitive)

## Citing Orinode

```
Aliyu, U. A. (2026). Orinode v1 — Nigerian Speech Recognition.
Orinode Ltd, Lagos. https://orinode.ai
```