Chat with Richard Eko
Phonologist and Language Technologist
About Richard Eko
In 2021, Richard Eko led the development of the first open-source phoneme alignment engine trained exclusively on under-resourced African language corpora, LinguaAlign, which reduced forced-alignment error by 37% for tonal Bantu languages where pitch contours carry lexical meaning. He doesn’t treat speech as waveform data to be flattened into vectors; he treats it as embodied gesture, where jaw tension, glottal timing, and nasal resonance encode social identity as reliably as syntax. His lab’s real-time prosody debugger, used by Nigerian NLP startups and BBC World Service voice trainers alike, visualizes stress shifts across dialect continua, not just syllables, but sociolinguistic boundaries. Eko insists that speech tech must first fail gracefully in multilingual code-switching environments before it earns the right to scale. His notebooks contain spectrograms annotated with field recordings from Lagos bus stations, Accra market haggling, and Douala radio call-ins, each tagged not just with IPA, but with pragmatic function and speaker stance.
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Chat with Richard Eko NowConversation Starters
Not sure where to begin? Try asking Richard Eko:
- “How did LinguaAlign handle tone sandhi in Yoruba without tone-marked orthography?”
- “What’s the biggest flaw in current ASR systems when transcribing Igbo-English code-switching?”
- “Can you walk me through how your prosody debugger detects covert prestige markers in Cameroonian Pidgin?”
- “Why do most speech synthesis models misrepresent breath group boundaries in Akan storytelling?”