Vice-Chancellor Honor awardee Sylvia Esi Wobil is hoping that Ghana gets its own version of a virtual assistant technology.
Speaking to UniversNews, she explained that the presence of a local virtual assistant similar to Alexa and Siri could help indigenes perform tasks while speaking the native languages.
She also expressed her desire to become Ghana’s first computational linguist.
“One day we should be able to have our version of Siri or Alexi so that we can just speak our local language and then it would out whatever we want to do. Hopefully, I know that at the moment we don’t have any or a significant amount of computational linguistics in Ghana so hope I could become the first computational linguist in the country.”
Sylvia expressed contentment over being recognised for her hardwork.
She described hardwork as “going the extra mile”.
“I’m excited and it’s quite fulfilling to know that my hard work has eventually paid off so I’m excited. Hard work is going the extra mile and doing it more than a regular person would do, so it’s not a big one-time event, it’s just the little things that accumulate to make up the success in the end.”
Sylvia also advised students to choose courses that align with their interest.
She emphasized on the importance of aligning electives with one’s passion.
“First of all, putting yourself in the course you are doing is very important. I’ll say that when you are to choose electives, choose courses that excite you, choose courses that align with some of your interest so that there is already some baseline passion and interest.”
Slvia Esi Wobil is an Awardee of the Rachel Aggrey Memorial Prize for the best graduating female student in the Bachelor of Arts Program of the Vice Chancellor Honor awards of the 2021-2022 Academic year and Valedictorian for the College of Arts in the 2023 congregation ceremony.
She is currently a Teaching Assistant at the Department of Linguistics University of Ghana after graduating with a Final Grade point of 3.94. She is also an alum from Wesley Girls High School where she read General Science.
She was later offered Economics, Study of Religion and Linguistics at the University of Ghana.
Sylvia hopes to further her education in Harvard University to study Computational Linguistics.
