Pantami lauds Uniccon Group at unveiling of Africa’s first humanoid robot

Minister for Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Pantami, has lauded Uniccon Group’s commitment to playing a vital part in advancing technological innovations in Nigeria and Africa.

Speaking at the world’s biggest technology event, GITEX, which took place at Dubai World Trade Centre, UAE, recently, he praised the group’s innovation as it officially unveiled Africa’s first humanoid robot named Omeife.

Created by Uniccon Group of Companies, one of Nigeria’s fastest growing technology startups that offer eclectic, innovative technology solutions to businesses and government agencies across Africa, Omeife is a six-foot-tall female, African humanoid that provides language as a service for businesses needing to integrate native African audiences. She is also a multipurpose and assistance robot. She speaks African languages and is programmed to have a deep understanding of African culture and behavioural patterns.

Omeife also has terrain intelligence, knowing the ground and having stability on the floor, which helps it navigate on non-flat surfaces and maintain good balance. It also has GPS for location and state-management for knowing whether the system is standing, walking, talking and so on as well as Advanced Gestures. It expresses while talking, gives hand illustrations, smiles and makes other bodily gestures.

Boasting a good grip, it has the ability to understand shape and how to hold things with its hand. Conversation wise, it has realtime understanding, can actively listen and focus on a specific conversation thread as it’s happening.

It has the ability to switch languages and interact with specific gestures and possesses native accent, complete with pitch and vocabulary detailed pronunciations of words, sentences and even phrases.

Omeife can also identify and tag humans through face and facial expressions; pay attention to a specific item when required; identify objects and knows their characteristics as well as calculate positions and distance of objects it sees.

The group added that it was built with top social interactive skills as it can pay attention to a specific person to keep conversations alive, is polite, careful and aware of words, phrases, sentences and expressions that are not polite in African cultures; safe for kids and not reactive; knowledgeable in various fields and always teachable as it has a learning pipeline to always improve and understand new things from conversations and has the ability to recall, understand old concepts better with new information.

Speaking on the Omeife project, Chuks Ekwueme, CEO, Uniccon Group of Companies, said, “Africa is fast being recognized for its contribution to the global tech ecosystem. Through Omeife and other projects, we’re happy to play a part in helping businesses and people all over Africa achieve their fullest potential by providing access to the most innovative technologies for efficiency.”