A single API for Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Nigerian English and Pidgin — with diacritic-safe transcripts, real-time language detection, and code-switch handling. Built in Lagos, tuned on telephony audio.
Orinode STT was built for the way Nigerians actually talk — fast, mid-sentence code-switching, telephony bandwidth, real-world noise. Not a thin wrapper over Whisper.
All languages return ISO 639-1 / 639-3 codes per token plus a confidence score.
Reproducible WER on public eval sets. Full methodology + 1,500-utterance code-switch benchmark in our trilingual benchmark post.
| Language | Test set | Whisper-large-v3 | Orinode STT | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hausa | Common Voice 17 (ha) | 47.2% | 11.4% | −35.8 |
| Yoruba | Common Voice 17 (yo) | 38.6% | 14.8% | −23.8 |
| Igbo | Common Voice 17 (ig) | 52.1% | 17.9% | −34.2 |
| Nigerian English | NaijaVoices (held-out) | 18.4% | 9.2% | −9.2 |
| Code-switch (Hausa↔EN) | Internal 500-utt eval | 41.7% | 12.6% | −29.1 |
Numbers are word error rate (lower is better). Eval methodology + raw outputs published at /benchmarks.json.
Three ways to call the API. Pick whichever fits your stack.
# Transcribe a Hausa audio file import requests resp = requests.post( "https://maraba.ai/api/v1/stt/", headers={"X-API-Key": "sk_live_..."}, json={ "audio_url": "https://cdn.example.com/call.wav", "language_hint": "ha", "preserve_diacritics": True, "detect_code_switch": True, }, ) print(resp.json()["text"]) # "Sannu, ina son ƙwayoyin ciwon kai"
curl https://maraba.ai/api/v1/stt/ \ -H "X-API-Key: sk_live_..." \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "audio_url": "https://cdn.example.com/call.wav", "language_hint": "auto", "preserve_diacritics": true }'
const resp = await fetch("https://maraba.ai/api/v1/stt/", { method: "POST", headers: { "X-API-Key": process.env.ORINODE_KEY }, body: JSON.stringify({ audio_url: url, language_hint: "auto", }), });
Pay only for audio processed. No subscriptions, no per-seat fees. Maraba (the call-center product) bundles unlimited STT for its plans.
.lower() non-English transcripts. ƙ, ɗ, ɓ (Hausa), ị, ụ, ọ (Igbo), è, é, ẹ, ọ, ṣ (Yoruba) are returned as UTF-8.wss://maraba.ai/api/v1/stt/stream/. Partial transcripts every ~200 ms.Request a beta API key — we're onboarding ten partners this quarter.
Request beta API key