AI-Powered App Translates Baby Cries to Enhance Parent-Child Communication

A Canadian medical technology company has unveiled an innovative AI-driven mobile app that translates a baby's cries, helping parents better understand their child's needs. Ubenwa Health recently introduced Nanni AI, a user-friendly tool designed to provide parents with insights into common parenting challenges, such as identifying when a baby may be hungry or tired.

With the Nanni AI app, parents can easily track their child’s daily routines and utilize voice commands to manage feeding schedules and diaper changes. The app also features an integrated chatbot, offering real-time support to caregivers. Remarkably, Nanni AI has successfully translated over one million baby cries into English and French, using a robust model that has been trained on thousands of clinically labeled recordings of infant cries.

Additionally, the app has significant potential for detecting health issues. Research conducted by Ubenwa indicates that Nanni AI can accurately identify signs of birth asphyxia—a critical respiratory condition in newborns—with an impressive 92.5% accuracy rate.

Samantha Latremouille, co-founder of Ubenwa, highlighted the overwhelming experience many new parents face during their baby's initial doctor visits. “With a newborn in their arms, parents have so much to remember about their baby's daily activities, from sleeping and crying to feeding and diaper changes. Beyond just a cry translator, our goal is to empower parents during these visits by providing them with an intuitive tool to track and summarize their baby's health accurately,” she stated.

Founded in 2017, Ubenwa Health specializes in AI-powered sound-based medical diagnostics. The company is backed by notable investors, including deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, and raised support from Radical Ventures and AIX Ventures.

The startup carefully curated its database of infant cries from around the globe, utilizing these recordings to train the neural network that powers the Nanni app. Originally gathered from comprehensive research on infant neurological injury risk factors, these recordings paved the way for the app’s development, which was released in beta in 2023. Since then, Nanni AI has been downloaded over 100,000 times across 200 countries.

While currently available in a limited number of languages, Ubenwa is committed to expanding its reach, having already translated baby cries into underserved languages such as Igbo, a language native to Nigeria.

CEO Charles Onu emphasized the importance of a baby's cry as a vital sign, comparable to traditional measures like heart rate and temperature, in enhancing infant care. He stated, “Nanni AI is a crucial step toward making our cry-based technologies available to all parents and healthcare professionals. We aim to enhance remote health monitoring by incorporating clinical-grade solutions into the app.”

Ubenwa is actively collaborating with hospitals to pilot its pioneering technology and conducting additional clinical studies to broaden its sound analysis capabilities for various medical conditions.