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Owoade ApotierioluwaCo-founder, CEO
People sometimes ask what drives us at Reedapt. For me, the honest answer is Star Trek. But the story starts earlier, and closer to home.
I was born and raised in Saki, a border town in Oyo State, Nigeria, next to the Republic of Benin. My parents were both language majors, so English came to me at home, early and almost without effort. That left me free to listen, outside the house, to the other languages of a border town.
My mother had a Yoruba proverb for whenever she caught me watching films: "Eni a n wo, kii woran." The one people are watching, it says, does not become a spectator. I argued with it, because I believed then, and still believe, that watching people do great things is how you learn to do them yourself. But an argument that worked in English did not survive the trip into Yoruba. Without its context, it sounded like a boy calling his elders foolish, and I lost every one of those arguments. It was my first lesson in how much meaning can fall away between two languages.
Because Benin is next door, French was one of the languages I picked up, and I was good at it, until secondary school brought classmates who had grown up speaking it. For the first time, a language made me feel like an outsider on home ground. French conjugation humbled me, and out of sheer stubbornness I took French as a subject in senior secondary school, one of six students in the class.
One of the other five was Ben. Ben is Yoruba, like me, but he was born across the border, and he was better at French than all of us. We were teased for never beating him. French had always been the one thing I was sure I was good at, so I did the only thing I could: I read. I read constantly, and at one point I traded some of my boarding-school provisions for new French words. It took five years, and by the time I finally caught up with Ben, I was studying French at university.
In my second year there, having seen first-hand how much a language gap divides people, I promised myself that if technology could ever close that gap, I would close it. What I had in mind was a universal translator, inspired by Lieutenant Uhura in Star Trek. Most people I described it to thought I was crazy, and at the time the technology simply wasn't there.
Not long after, modern AI arrived, and the idea stopped sounding crazy.
I tell this story because the problem is personal, and because most people have felt it at least once: being alone in a room where everyone speaks a language they don't, or losing an opportunity because they didn't speak the right one. I know what it is to have ideas and watch the world pass you by because you don't speak its language, or because of where you happened to be born. I believe language should never be a barrier to communication, connection or commerce, and that your voice deserves to be understood by anyone, whatever language they speak.
My co-founders and I started Reedapt to do something about it. Until recently, reaching people in another language meant waiting on human translators, or accepting machine translation that often missed the meaning. Today Reedapt does this in two ways. Reedapt Dub is AI dubbing for video and audio into 16+ languages, in the speaker's own cloned voice. Reedapt Live uses AI to interpret live broadcasts into several languages in real time, with replays afterwards; it is already used by churches, creators and events.
That early lesson from my mother's proverb still shapes how we build. A translation that keeps the words but loses the meaning has failed. That is why a Reedapt dub keeps the speaker's own voice, and why you can review it and fix any line in the editor before you download it.
Your voice should travel as far as your ideas. That is what we are building.
