Voice for development · MVP built · live demo
CivicRead
Any written text, read aloud in Twi — plus a daily audio news digest.
Built for Non-literate adults; blind and low-vision readers; older relatives
The problem
Millions of Ghanaians who are blind, low-vision, or not literate in English are locked out of written news and public information. Radio covers headlines but not the specific thing you need, when you need it.
Twi text-to-speech now exists, but nothing puts it in front of these readers as a product.
How it works
Send or forward any text on WhatsApp and receive it back as a Twi voice note. English text is translated first, and the audio says plainly that it was machine-translated before reading it.
Subscribers also get one daily news digest — three to five headlines, human-reviewed before synthesis, delivered as a single audio message.
Why it can work
Audio is generated once and cached, so a digest heard by thousands costs one synthesis. That is what makes the economics survive African data and compute costs.
It is deliberately the simplest product in the family: text-to-speech only, no voice input, no advice, no safety-critical content.
Honest state
Built and running end to end on our own stack — our Twi voice, our translation, no external vendor. You can try it today.
The voice is intelligible but still formal-sounding, because it learned from scripture recordings. A native speaker scored it 55% on first hearing. Fixing that needs a voice actor, not more training.
This product is built and testable. It is not yet available to the public.