Omeife: Meet First African Humanoid Robot, Built and Completed in Nigeria
TECHDIGEST – Omeife is a female-looking humanoid robot being developed by the Uniccon Group of Companies programmed to speak Pidgin, Yoruba, English, French, Arabic, Kiswahili, Hausa, Igbo and Afrikaans and the first African humanoid robot.
Omeife was first unveiled on 10 October 2022 at the GITEX technology event at the Dubai World Trade Centre, UAE.
Africa’s first humanoid robot, ‘Omeife’ has been built by a two-year-old Nigerian technology company called Uniccon Group in Abuja, Nigeria.
The 6-feet tall bilingual or can we call it a multi-lingual robot named ‘Omeife’ is a female Igbo figure/character that provides language as a service for businesses needing to integrate native African audiences.
She is also a multipurpose and assistance robot. She speaks African languages and is programmed to have a deep understanding of African culture and behavioural patterns. Took two years to create and actually capable of speaking and understanding eight different languages.
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Omeife also has terrain intelligence, knowing the ground and having stability on the floor, which helps it navigate on non-flat surfaces and maintain good balance. It also has GPS for location and state-management for knowing whether the system is standing, walking, talking and so on as well as Advanced Gestures. It expresses while talking, gives hand illustrations, smiles and makes other bodily gestures.
Boasting a good grip, it has the ability to understand shape and how to hold things with its hand. Conversation wise, it has realtime understanding, can actively listen and focus on a specific conversation thread as it’s happening.
It has the ability to switch languages and interact with specific gestures and possesses native accent, complete with pitch and vocabulary detailed pronunciations of words, sentences and even phrases.
Omeife can also identify and tag humans through face and facial expressions; pay attention to a specific item when required; identify objects and knows their characteristics as well as calculate positions and distance of objects it sees.
The group added that it was built with top social interactive skills as it can pay attention to a specific person to keep conversations alive, is polite, careful and aware of words, phrases, sentences and expressions that are not polite in African cultures; safe for kids and not reactive; knowledgeable in various fields and always teachable as it has a learning pipeline to always improve and understand new things from conversations and has the ability to recall, understand old concepts better with new information.
Speaking on the Omeife project, Chuks Ekwueme, CEO, Uniccon Group of Companies, said, “Africa is fast being recognized for its contribution to the global tech ecosystem.
“Through Omeife and other projects, we’re happy to play a part in helping businesses and people all over Africa achieve their fullest potential by providing access to the most innovative technologies for efficiency.”
‘Omeife’ is an Igbo word which translates in English to mean ‘doer of things’.
