Nigeria's Intron Expands Beyond Healthcare to Courts and Call Centers in Africa

Nigerian health tech startup Intron is now expanding into sectors like court transcription and call centers, with live deployments already underway. The startup’s Sahara voice AI suite has outperformed major global platforms, including Google, Microsoft Azure, AWS, and OpenAI, in recognizing African speech patterns.

Intron’s technology is actively used in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda, with its solutions serving over 30 hospitals and more than 56,000 patients. The system significantly improves efficiency, cutting radiology report times from 48 hours to just 20 minutes and enabling clinical note-taking in less than a minute.

The Rwanda Ministry of Health has deployed Intron’s voice-powered electronic medical records system nationwide, allowing clinicians to document cases faster using voice commands.

“Our recent industry-leading benchmarks show what’s possible when Africa builds for itself. Sahara is more than a technical breakthrough; it’s an ecosystem victory,” said Tobi Olatunji, CEO of Intron. “Rather than rail against Big Tech model bias, why not build better models?”

In 2023, a judge in Katsina State, Nigeria, tested Intron’s system for courtroom transcription after learning about it through medical pilots. He found it “surprisingly effective in capturing legal conversations.”

Following this, the Ogun State Judiciary officially adopted the system, reducing court sessions from up to four hours to around two or three. Legal teams said this allows them to “focus on what really matters: justice.”

After raising $1.6 million in seed funding in 2024, Intron scaled its research, cloud infrastructure, and engineering teams, now serving over 40 organisations across eight countries.

Its model utilises Intron’s proprietary AccentMix algorithm and is backed by dedicated research and development efforts. It includes the Sahara Optimus, Intron’s flagship versatile speech recognition system, which is designed specifically to understand diverse African accents across various domains.

Sahara TTS, a pioneering text-to-speech engine featuring over 80 male and female voices in more than 40 local accents from across 10+ nations. And the Sahara Voice Lock, a smart voice security option solution built to identify and verify African speech patterns, helps detect fraud and prevent deep-fake misuse.

Intron’s models now power call centers, courtrooms, and healthcare facilities, with further development underway for voice OTPs, multi-factor authentication, and expanded language support across Africa.