A Nigerian software engineer, Kingsley Udoma, and his team have launched a voice-first artificial intelligence system named Theresa AI, designed to guide users through any topic or subject on their minds.
Speaking with Saturday PUNCH, Udoma said the AI system was built with co-founders Jide Loye and Israel Akpan and was unveiled recently.
The tech expert added that the idea for Theresa AI came from a pattern he repeatedly noticed about people who read the same explanation five times and still walked away confused.
Udoma said, “The problem was never a lack of content. After all, the internet is drowning in content. What I noticed was missing was somebody to actually talk to. So, instead of building another app to scroll through, my team built something that listens, responds, and thinks alongside you in real time, whether you’re stuck on an assignment, wrestling with a work problem, or just chasing a random curiosity at 1 am.
“What makes Theresa different is how natural it feels. If you ask it a question out loud, you get an answer back out loud. There is no typing required, though it is there if you want it. Theresa can walk through genuinely hard problems step by step, from calculus to financial modelling, and it will sketch out diagrams and flowcharts on screen as it goes, the way a good tutor scribbles on a whiteboard.
“It doesn’t just recite. It reads the room. If you sound lost, it slows down and tries a different angle, the same way a person would if they saw the confusion on your face.”
Also speaking, the co-founder, Loye, clarified that the AI system also speaks the way Nigerians speak.
“Beyond English, Theresa understands and responds in Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, French, and Spanish, so help is not locked behind a single language,” he said.
On his part, Akpan said, “Theresa AI is live and in testing now, with the team working towards a wider rollout across Nigeria. Udoma’s goal is to give people someone they can actually talk to anytime, in a country where that kind of one-on-one support is often out of reach.”
Saturday PUNCH gathered that Udoma had previously built NounPaddi, an EdTech platform that now serves over 1,600 students at the National Open University of Nigeria, Lagos.
For over two years, there have been around half a dozen prominent independent creators, alongside more than 120 broader AI ventures, that have launched conversational or localised large language models and AI agents inspired by ChatGPT.
