Africa-focused voice technology firm, Intron, is gaining ground in key sectors across the continent with its homegrown artificial intelligence solutions that understand African voices, names, and languages better than global counterparts.

The company’s flagship product, Sahara, is a suite of speech recognition and text-to-speech AI models designed specifically for African accents.

Built on over 3.5 million audio clips from more than 18,000 speakers across 30 countries, Sahara reportedly outperforms established platforms such as OpenAI, Microsoft Azure, Google, and Amazon Web Services in recognising African speech patterns.

The Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Intron, Tobi Olatunji, said the company’s innovation stems from a deep commitment to building technology that includes, rather than excludes, African users.

“Intron represents a future where no community is left behind by technology. Sahara is more than a technical breakthrough; it’s an ecosystem victory,” he said in an email to The PUNCH.

Since launching in 2022 with a clinical speech recognition tool for hospitals, Intron has expanded into justice, finance, telecommunications, and government. In Ogun State, Sahara is now being used by the judiciary to transcribe court proceedings in real-time, reducing hearing times and allowing judges to focus on deliberations instead of manual note-taking.

“Before now, we had to write down everything. It was exhausting and slow. Now, what used to take over four hours ends in less than three,” the Office of the Chief Registrar, Ogun State High Court, stated.

In the health sector, Rwanda’s Ministry of Health has deployed Sahara to fast-track the rollout of electronic medical records, using voice inputs and automated translation to simplify data entry. At EHA Clinics in Nigeria, doctors now complete clinical notes in under a minute.

Sahara is also gaining ground in customer service. Branch International, a digital finance platform, is collaborating with Intron to automate after-hours support using conversational voice agents, enhancing customer experience and operational efficiency.

With its AccentMix algorithm and robust local data, Sahara can recognise more than 300 African accents from Ghanaian English to Zulu making it a strong fit for diverse environments. Sahara-Optimus serves as a general-purpose speech recognition model tuned for African speech.

Sahara-TTS is a pan-African text-to-speech engine with more than 80 distinct voices across 40 accents. Sahara-Voice-Lock, another key solution, is designed to provide voice authentication for security purposes, helping to tackle fraud and deepfakes across the continent.

Intron is also training its next-generation models, Sahara-Titan and Sahara-Primus, which will support real-time translation and natural voice synthesis in up to 20 African languages including Swahili, Hausa, and Zulu.

Following a $1.6m pre-seed round in 2024, the startup has accelerated its research and development, expanded its engineering and growth teams, and currently serves more than 40 organisations across eight countries.

Clients and partners include Audere, a South African health non-profit using Sahara in a youth reproductive chatbot; C-Care, Uganda’s largest private hospital network; Helium Health in Nigeria; and RUPHA, the Rural and Urban Private Hospitals Association of Kenya.

“We built for the hardest environments first, noisy hospitals, overstretched clinics and now we’re scaling to courts, call centres, and beyond,” Mr Olatunji said. “African AI is rising fast. It’s time to build and buy African.”