Africans of the Year: Elly Savatia
Say hello to the Kenyan innovator who’s developed an app that translates speech into sign language.
Robert Amalemba
Elly Savatia spent his childhood tinkering with clocks, radios, and other electronics he found around the house. At age 13, he developed a rotatable wind turbine, winning a challenge at school.
And thus his journey as an innovator began.
“I knew this path was meant for me because I never believed in theories taught in the traditional classroom without sufficient experimentation,” Savatia tells The Continent.
Over the years, he has focused his innovation on disability access. Savatia created The Stair Ramp – a robotic staircase for wheelchair users – and, most recently, the Terp 360 app. The app translates spoken language into sign language in real time using AI and 3D avatars.
With the app, people whose hearing is impaired no longer need a human interpreter. They simply activate it and are able to follow conversations in real time. The deaf community in Kenya were early adopters, helping with beta-testing and sampling some 2,300 words and texts that the app converts into signs. It has already been adopted by at least 2,000 people.
Savatia conceived the idea for the app in 2019 while he was teaching students in northeastern Kenya, after watching 300 deaf students relying on a single human interpreter in the room. In a country with high mobile penetration, he thought a mobile translation app could offer a more accessible and personalised solution.
The lack of data in Kiswahili was his main challenge. “Most available datasets were British or American, with no Swahili content,” he says. “A government grant allowed us to collaborate with Kenya’s deaf community to create a dataset tailored to our users.”
The app is now available on a trial basis in Kenya but Savatia hopes to expand to include other African languages. He is eyeing Rwanda and Uganda as the next countries to roll it out in.