How Navoras reads Kenyan text
Shillings, phone numbers, M-Pesa, dates and Swahili time, read the way Kenyans say them.
- Who can do this
- Everyone
- Reading time
- 1 min read
Speech models misread what they weren't trained on: they say KES as letters and read phone numbers as one huge number. Navoras writes these out before the voice sees them.
| You write | In English | In Kiswahili |
|---|---|---|
| KES 1,200 (or Ksh 1,200, 1,200/=) | one thousand two hundred shillings | shilingi elfu moja mia mbili |
| 0712 345 678 | in the groups you wrote | in the groups you wrote |
| Paybill 247247 | digit by digit | digit by digit |
| 9:00 a.m. | nine a.m. | saa tatu asubuhi |
| 14/10/2026 | the fourteenth of October… | tarehe kumi na nne Oktoba… |
| 25% | twenty-five percent | asilimia ishirini na tano |
Names of places, institutions and brands everyone knows (counties, towns, M-Pesa and the like) come from a lexicon kept by our Kiswahili editor.
Swahili time
In a Kiswahili sentence, clock times are read in Swahili time, which counts from six in the morning: 9 a.m. is saa tatu asubuhi.
When you don't want it
Send apply_text_normalization: "off" and the voice gets your text exactly as written. Each sentence is still read in its own language.
Still stuck?
A person at Navoras reads every message and replies by email. Name your workspace, and the request ID if it's about one.