Intron’s Sahara Voice-AI Expands Adoption

Intron, a voice technology company focused on African languages and accents, has expanded the reach of its Sahara voice-AI suite beyond the healthcare sector. Initially launched in 2022 to support clinical speech recognition, the platform is now being used by financial institutions, telecom operators, courts, and government agencies in several African countries.

Sahara is a suite of speech recognition and text-to-speech AI models designed to address the limitations of mainstream voice tools in recognising African accents, languages, and dialects. According to Intron, the system is trained on 3.5 million audio clips from more than 18,000 speakers across over 30 countries and can recognise over 300 distinct African accents. The company also claims that Sahara outperforms major global platforms, including those from OpenAI, AWS, Azure, and Google, when it comes to accurately understanding African speech.

The company reports that early results are already visible across different sectors. In Nigeria, the Ogun State Judiciary has implemented Sahara to support courtroom transcription. Judges are reportedly able to reduce manual note-taking and cut session times by nearly half. In Rwanda, the Ministry of Health is using the platform to support a nationwide rollout of electronic medical records, streamlining documentation for healthcare providers. At EHA Clinics in Nigeria, Intron states that Sahara has reduced the average time to complete a 100-word clinical note to 57 seconds.

In the customer service sector, companies such as Branch International are integrating Sahara’s conversational AI tools to manage after-hours call centre operations. According to the company, this has led to improvements in queue management and customer satisfaction.

The Sahara suite includes several models tailored for different applications. These include:

Sahara-Optimus, a general-purpose speech recognition model for African accents;
Sahara-TTS, a text-to-speech model that supports over 80 male and female voices in 40+ African accents; and
Sahara-Voice-Lock, a voice authentication tool aimed at enhancing security and combating fraud using voice biometrics.

Intron is also developing new models. Sahara-Titan, currently in training, is designed to transcribe and translate between 20 widely spoken African languages, including Swahili, Hausa, and Zulu. Another model, Sahara-Primus, will focus on producing natural-sounding speech in those same languages.

The company says it is working with multiple partners across the continent. These include the Ministry of Health in Rwanda, C-Care in Uganda, Helium Health in Nigeria, Rescue.co in Kenya, the Rural and Urban Private Hospitals Association of Kenya (RUPHA), Audere in South Africa, and Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in Nigeria. The applications range from reducing clinical documentation time to enhancing chatbot interactivity in youth health programs.

Intron’s data assets include over 30,000 hours of voice recordings across 64 languages and more than 32,000 speakers. The company offers APIs for speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and conversational AI to enterprises, startups, and public sector institutions.

In a statement, Intron CEO Tobi Olatunji said the company’s focus is on building AI tools that reflect the linguistic realities of Africa, rather than relying solely on imported solutions. The company describes Sahara as a locally developed alternative to global voice AI platforms.