How Voice AI Is Speeding Up Justice and Patient Care Across Africa

Intron, a leading Africa-centric voice AI technology platform, is significantly advancing the delivery of justice, patient care, and customer experiences across the continent. This is achieved through Sahara, a comprehensive suite of advanced speech recognition and text-to-speech AI voice models specifically engineered for diverse African voices and accents. Sahara demonstrates superior performance compared to global platforms such as OpenAI, Azure, Google, and AWS in accurately recognising African accents, as validated by publicly available benchmarks and datasets.

Initially launched in 2022 with a clinical speech recognition platform for hospitals and health ministries throughout Africa, Intron has since expanded its capabilities. The company now offers advanced real-time voice AI solutions across critical sectors, including financial services, telecommunications, legal, and government agencies. These solutions are already generating measurable impact and powering innovative voice applications across various verticals:

Legal Services: The Ogun State Judiciary recently adopted Intron Sahara to streamline court proceedings by alleviating the need for manual note-taking. This allows judges to concentrate fully on courtroom dialogue, thereby enhancing attention, accuracy, and speed. The implementation of Sahara has resulted in significantly reduced session times, enabling more cases to be heard and accelerating the administration of justice. The Office of the Chief Registrar, Ogun State High Court, commented, “Before now, we had to write down everything. It was exhausting and slow. Now, we can focus on what matters. What used to take 4+ hours now concludes in 2–3 hours. My Lord no longer has to write during proceedings. He now focuses entirely on what is being said, ensures everything is properly recorded, and we’re achieving much more in significantly less time than before.”

Health: Rwanda’s Ministry of Health partnered with Intron to expedite the nationwide deployment of its electronic medical records system. Intron’s voice-driven documentation and automated translation features are designed to facilitate adoption among clinicians. At EHA Clinics, a prominent hospital network in Abuja, Kano, and Lagos, Nigeria, Sahara models reduced clinical note-taking time to an average of 57 seconds for a roughly 100-word report, simultaneously improving the quality and detail of clinical documentation.

Call Centres: Digital finance platform Branch International is collaborating with Intron to enhance after-hours outbound customer engagement. Utilising Sahara CX Intelligence, a solution featuring advanced low-latency human-like conversational voice agents, Branch aims to improve responsiveness and customer experience.

Despite AI’s transformative impact on communication, productivity, and innovation, over 2 billion people in Africa remain largely underserved by global technology providers. Consequently, conventional voice recognition systems often struggle with African names, languages, and accents. Sahara directly addresses these challenges through speech AI models trained on extensive local data. These models accurately recognise heavily accented African names, currencies, numbers, decimals, and technical terminology where imported platforms typically underperform.

At its core, Sahara is built upon a proprietary dataset comprising over 3.5 million audio clips from more than 18,000 speakers across 30+ countries. This foundation is powered by Intron’s patented AccentMix algorithm and years of dedicated research and development. Intron’s speech-to-text models recognise over 300 distinct African accents and dialects, ranging from Ghanaian English to Zulu-inflected speech. This deep exposure to African speech patterns also contributes to stronger performance on North African and Arabic-English accents, exceeding expectations beyond explicit training data and outperforming several frontier voice AI models.

The Africa-centric AI models driving this impact include:

• Sahara-Optimus: Intron’s flagship general-purpose cross-domain speech recognition model optimised for African accents.
• Sahara-TTS: The first pan-African speech synthesis model supporting 80+ female/male voices across 40+ African accents spoken in over 10 countries.
• Sahara-Voice-Lock: An intelligent voice authentication solution (MFA or OTP) tuned for African voices, accents, and languages to enhance security and combat fraud and deepfakes.

Leveraging a recent expansion of its dataset with over 30,000 hours of local language data spanning 64+ languages from over 32,000 speakers, Intron is currently training its next-generation models. Sahara-Titan is being developed as a single advanced AI model capable of understanding, transcribing, and translating between 20 of Africa’s most prominent languages, including Swahili, Hausa, and Zulu. Similarly, Sahara-Primus is being trained to generate fluent, high-quality, natural-sounding speech in 20 African languages. These advanced models are poised to meet significant demand and usher in a new era of compelling user experiences across the continent.

Tobi Olatunji, CEO of Intron, stated, “Intron envisions a future where technology serves all communities. Our recent industry-leading benchmarks demonstrate the potential when Africa develops solutions for its own needs. Sahara represents more than a technical breakthrough; it is an ecosystem achievement. Instead of solely focusing on the biases of global models, we are building demonstrably better ones.”

Meaningful AI adoption is increasing across Africa, and Intron is strategically positioned to support innovative AI initiatives by startups, enterprises, and government institutions. The company provides robust APIs for speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and conversational voicebots specifically tailored for local requirements. In South Africa, the digital health nonprofit Audere is integrating Intron’s voice AI into its youth-focused reproductive health chatbot to create more natural and engaging conversations. C-Care, Uganda’s largest private hospital network, is also leveraging Sahara across its 20+ hospitals and clinics to reduce patient wait times, minimise errors, and streamline documentation. Intron collaborates with several other organisations, including Helium Health in Nigeria, the Rural and Urban Private Hospitals Association of Kenya (RUPHA), Rescue.co in Kenya, Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in Northern Nigeria, and Elephant Healthcare, all driving impactful and innovative AI applications across Africa.

Mr. Olatunji concluded, “Intron originated in demanding hospital environments where background noise and resource constraints made accurate speech recognition a daily challenge. We initially built for the most difficult context, enabling our technology to scale effectively to courts, call centres, and content creation applications. I am proud of our team’s accomplishments, but we are part of a larger movement. African AI is rapidly advancing, powered by local talent and data. Now is the critical moment to support, build, and invest in African innovation to ensure no community is left behind.”

Following a $1.6 million pre-seed funding round in 2024, Intron has accelerated its research and development efforts, enhanced both cloud-native and on-premises deployment capabilities, and continues to expand its Research, Engineering, and Growth teams. Currently serving over 40 organisations across 8 countries, the company is evolving beyond its healthcare origins to become a preferred voice infrastructure layer for startups and enterprises across Africa. To explore how Sahara can enhance your voice-driven services, please visit www.intron.io or contact [email protected].