hirwablessing/Sakwe

Voice-based PWA delivering traditional Rwandan riddles (Ibisakuzo) to children in Kinyarwanda. ALU capstone. # Sakwe Sakwe is a voice-based Progressive Web App that brings traditional Rwandan riddles (Ibisakuzo) to children aged 6 to 10. A child hears a riddle spoken in Kinyarwanda, says their answer out loud, and the app responds with the correct answer and a child-friendly explanation, also in Kinyarwanda. The name comes from the Kinyarwanda riddle ritual: one person calls "Sakwe-Sakwe!" and the others answer "Soma!" to show they are ready to play. This is a capstone research project at the African Leadership University, Kigali. ## Demo The app is live at sakwe.duckdns.org. Watch a short walkthrough of the app: bugufi.link ## Why it matters Since 2019, English has been the language of instruction from Primary 1 in Rwanda, and Kinyarwanda is now taught only as a subject. Many children are losing fluency in their mother tongue. Ibisakuzo are a traditional oral learning tool that is no longer passed down as often. Sakwe turns them into an interactive experience. ## Research outputs 1. A Kinyarwanda text-to-speech voice, fine-tuned from Meta's MMS-TTS Kinyarwanda model on my own voice recordings. 2. An open Ibisakuzo dataset of 114 riddle entries, each with a child-friendly explanation, accepted answer variants, vocabulary notes, and audio. ## Status The three research outputs are complete. I built the enriched Ibisakuzo dataset (114 riddles with explanations, accepted answer variants, vocabulary notes, and difficulty levels, plus about 31 minutes of my own recordings cleaned into 342 audio clips), fine-tuned the Kinyarwanda voice, and built the app. In a blind naturalness listening test the fine-tuned voice scored a Mean Opinion Score of 4.09 out of 5, above the Digital Umuganda YourTTS baseline of 3.0. The React PWA and FastAPI backend check spoken answers and are deployed live at sakwe.duckdns.org. A usability pilot with children aged 6 to 10 is the main remaining step and is left as future work. ## Installing and running t …