A ring with no voice in it
Namu AI Lab
On a mobile phone, the one who calls pays to speak. So people built a language out of the call nobody answers, the beep, with its own grammar, manners and rules of courtship. The phone companies learned its words much later, and never its rules.
On a mobile phone, speaking costs money, and the one who calls is the one who pays. The researcher Jonathan Donner noted that this way of billing pushes people to make short calls and to receive long ones. In September 2004, fifteen people in Kigali, most of them running small businesses, were interviewed for his study of how people manage, mostly in Kinyarwanda or Luganda. Rasirsa, a jewellery maker, put it plainly. “Here in Rwanda people are not rich enough to call every time,” he said. Many had only prepaid cards. So they beeped.
A beep is a call ended before the other person can pick up. It is nearly free and leaves a number among the missed calls. With that alone, people said a great deal. Patrick, a chicken farmer, knew his wife’s beeps. One in the morning meant hello. Two in the late evening meant she had finished work, and he always went to pick her up. When Liban, a taxi driver, came back for his wife, he beeped her, and she came out to meet him without a word spoken on either side. Most beeps, Donner found, ask to be called back. Others follow a code agreed in advance, and some ask for nothing at all.
A language needs rules, and this one had them. You beep someone with more money than you, and the richer one pays for the call. Donner describes this as moving the cost of talking towards the people who can afford it. You never beep someone whose favour you need, so Patrick never beeped the restaurants that bought his chickens. You do not beep too often, or people talk. And a man courting a woman has to call her, Filicien, a marketing student, told the researchers, even if he must borrow a friend’s phone to do it.
In Niamey, in the summers of 2003 and 2004, the researcher Gado Alzouma interviewed people about how they used their mobile phones. Their popularity, he concluded, lay mainly in their low cost and how easy they were to handle, and they asked for no particular level of literacy. In 2008 he wrote that users go as far as to biper the people they want to reach, as one says in Africa, and that calls tend to be short, with greetings cut to a minimum. In Nigeria and Ghana the word is flashing. In Ethiopia, Reuters reported in 2007, a beep is a miskin, which it translated as a pitiful call.
The networks charged for speech and could not bill a call that nobody answered. As the beeps piled up, the operators learned the vocabulary. They began offering callback requests that were free or nearly free. Orange in Senegal had Rappelle-moi, or woo ma between close friends, as a 2012 blog post on its services put it. Safaricom in Kenya allowed five a day and told customers to stop flashing and ask nicely. In Nigeria the menus spelled out what a beep might mean. A Nigerian tech site that went back through MTN’s archived pages found that its request could end with I love you or send me credit. Etisalat’s could say I landed safely.
Then a network began speaking for people. In 2015 the blogger Souleymane Thiam described an Orange service in Senegal that sent please call me back by itself whenever a call failed to get through. Customers were complaining, he wrote, because such a request is usually read as coming from the one with less credit. His example was a young woman receiving one from her sweetheart, the man who, by every rule of the beep, should have called. The service had learned the words of the language and none of its rules.
The beep was a language laid over a network built for people who could pay to talk. It was complete, with a grammar, manners and a way of courting, made by people who had little credit and plenty to say to each other. Technology came to it late and from the outside. It is the machine that has to learn the rules, the way Patrick learned his wife’s.
At Namu we build voice technology for the languages of the Sahel, from the voices of the people who speak them, for the phones they already have. We build it so that speaking, in your own language, is enough.