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A Nigerian startup using artificial intelligence to build speech transcription platforms for African accents is expanding beyond an initial focus on health care, serving a growing demand for automation across the continent and filling a vital gap left by Silicon Valley tech giants.
Intron began testing speech-to-text models to help doctors with note-taking in Nigeria in 2022 and landed about 40 hospital clients in countries including Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, and Uganda, the company’s founder and chief executive Tobi Olatunji told Semafor.
It has expanded to courtrooms in southwest Nigeria this year, and is testing a rollout for call centers operated by banks and telecom companies where manual documentation eats into productivity, Olatunji said.
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Interest in speech recognition technologies has grown with the explosion of AI advancements. But despite high-level voice assistants from Google and Amazon, there has remained “a huge opportunity to provide tools that are actually designed for African accents,” Olatunji said.
The startup’s suite of “Sahara” voice and text models capture the specifics of more than 300 African accents and outperform US-made models, he said.
Intron’s revenue in the first quarter of this year was “about seven to eight times” the total for 2024, Olatunji said. The startup, which raised $1.6 million in seed money last year, plans to grow commercially by signing deals with governments: Intron has already finalized an agreement with Rwanda’s health ministry and the company is also in talks with authorities in Ghana, Ethiopia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, he said.
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- OpenAI and Meta are working on a project to fine-tune AI large language models to translate regional African languages for French telecoms company Orange.