Intron’s Sahara AI: Powering Africa’s Voice Revolution Across Justice, Healthcare, and Customer Experience

Africa’s voice is finally being heard literally and powerfully thanks to Intron, an innovative Africa-centric voice technology platform. With its groundbreaking Sahara AI models, Intron is redefining the future of speech recognition and text-to-speech solutions for African voices, accents, and dialects. Outperforming global giants like Google, AWS, Azure, and OpenAI in recognising African speech patterns, Intron is ensuring that Africans are no longer excluded from the benefits of the global AI revolution.

Accelerating Justice, Healthcare, and Customer Service with African AI

Launched in 2022 with clinical speech recognition tools for African hospitals, Intron has since expanded its impact across several sectors. In legal services, the Ogun State Judiciary now uses Sahara to automate courtroom transcription, allowing judges to focus entirely on proceedings. What once took over four hours now wraps up in nearly half the time, increasing efficiency and speeding up access to justice.

In healthcare, the Rwandan Ministry of Health and EHA Clinics in Nigeria are already using Sahara to streamline patient documentation. Reports that once took minutes now take less than a minute, boosting both accuracy and productivity for clinicians. Similarly, C-Care, Uganda’s largest private hospital network, has adopted Sahara to cut down on patient wait times and medical errors across over 20 hospitals and clinics.

In customer engagement, fintech platform Branch International is using Intron’s Sahara CX Intelligence to personalise after-hours outbound calls with lifelike, conversational voice agents. These low-latency AI voicebots are enhancing customer satisfaction and boosting operational efficiency.

Homegrown Models Built on African Data for African Needs

The power of Sahara lies in its design: it is built specifically for Africa, by Africans. Unlike traditional models that stumble over African names and heavily accented English, Sahara was trained on over 3.5 million audio clips from more than 18,000 speakers in 30+ countries, covering over 300 distinct African accents. Intron’s proprietary AccentMix algorithm and years of targeted R&D enable Sahara to deliver unmatched performance in speech recognition and synthesis.

Sahara’s suite includes:

• Sahara-Optimus: a cross-domain speech recognition model for general-purpose use
• Sahara-TTS: the first pan-African text-to-speech model with over 80 voices in 40+ accents
• Sahara-Voice-Lock: voice authentication for fraud prevention and digital security

Looking ahead, Intron is training its next-generation Sahara-Titan and Sahara-Primus models. These will transcribe, translate, and generate speech in 20 of Africa’s major languages, including Swahili, Hausa, and Zulu—a significant leap in local-language AI capabilities.

Following a $1.6 million pre-seed raise in 2024, Intron has expanded to 40 organisations in 8 countries, including partnerships with Helium Health, RUPHA, Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, and Elephant Healthcare. CEO Tobi Olatunji affirms the mission: “Intron is proof that Africa can build better. Our models are not just technical breakthroughs—they are victories of voice, visibility, and inclusion.”

Intron is not just building tools; it’s building an ecosystem where no African community is left behind.