Cdial

Centre for Digitization of Indigenous African Languages, CDIAL is a technology company focused on artificial intelligence (AI) for the enterprise, specializing in language models in low-resourced languages, research, and deployment. The organization was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Los Angeles, US with offices in Lagos, Nigeria.

In 2023, CDIAL launched its technology, Indigenius Mobile, a conversational AI platform for multilingual communication and interaction. CDIAL also released its multilingual smart Keyboard designed to enable communication in 180 African languages and allow users to communicate in their native languages.

In May 2023, CDIAL unveiled a dictionary that translates modern words into native languages covering new existing words not contained in native dictionaries.

The organization was officially established in 2021 by three Nigerians, Yinka Iyinolakan, Soji Akinlabi, and Shona Olalere setting out on a mission to localize digital access and digitize indigenous languages, including building technology that businesses can use to deploy customer support agents, chatbots, search engines, copywriting, translation, summarization, and other AI-driven products. CDIAL products include the Indigenius app on Play Store, enterprise API solutions for translation and speech recognition, and hardware systems supporting African languages

In 2023, CDIAL got a $50,000 Prize at Pharrell Williams' Black Ambition third annual demo day competition, in a ceremony held in Tribeca, New York. In 2024, CDIAL received the Innovative and Technology Award presented by Nigeria's vice president,Kashim Shettima on behalf of the Federal Government of Nigeria as part of its 2024 MSME Day support program, and was listed as part of the first cohort of ten innovative startups by Accelerate Africa, an accelerator program striving to be the Y Combinator of Africa. Google also selected CDIAL for its Cohort 8 Africa accelerator program for startups.