Otter and Fireflies do not fail at African languages. They discard them. Unknown languages get filtered out as noise or approximated to the nearest English word. Tobiloba Sulaimon, a self-taught developer from Lagos, built AuTrans to transcribe Pidgin, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo as they were actually spoken. It started as a fix for a meeting the tools could not handle.

• The differentiator is what incumbents treat as an edge case. Not accuracy, but a product decision to drop what it does not recognise.
• Africa first is a constraint, not a slogan. Limited funding cannot cover many languages at once, so splitting attention means doing none of them well.
• Self-taught to shipping in roughly two years. YouTube, a first paid client, then a role where being the only developer forced the pace.
• He refuses features users ask for. Explicitly so the product never becomes a jack of all trades.
• First version shipped in about a week. The scope was small because the problem was his own.

• The gap the incumbents left open
• Africa first, and why it is a constraint
• Self-taught from Lagos
• Refusing the features people ask for
• Chapters and timestamps
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Tangible things were said and their machine did not capture that. And I thought that since I am a software developer, maybe I could build something that would solve this problem.

Mainstream tools filter unrecognised languages out, or map them onto the nearest English word. The output looks like a transcription failure. It is closer to a design choice, and it is the kind of choice a large company can make for years without anyone internally noticing.

That is the general lesson worth taking from this episode even if you never touch transcription. Find the thing your category's incumbents have classified as an acceptable failure.

We are African first. We are focusing on ourselves first, so I’m trying to solve this problem within Africa first before we move on.

This is not positioning. Limited funding cannot cover the continent's language count, so attempting breadth would mean doing all of it badly. The narrowness is what makes the quality possible, and the quality is the entire product.

Everything I know today I learnt on my own. I am a self-taught software developer.

HTML, CSS and JavaScript from YouTube after high school. A first paid client build. Then a front-end role at a game studio where being the only developer meant learning fast or shipping nothing. The first version of AuTrans took about a week.<...