A Nigerian artificial intelligence startup, Intron, has expanded its speech recognition platform, Sahara, to support 57 languages following the addition of 24 new ones, as the company deepens its presence across sectors such as healthcare, legal services, finance and telecommunications. The upgraded Sahara v2 now includes 23 African languages and is designed to recognise more than 500 African accents, reflecting the continent’s complex linguistic diversity.
According to the company, the newly added languages include Hausa, Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo, Twi, Amharic, Shona, Wolof, isiZulu, Kinyarwanda and several others, selected largely based on commercial demand. The upgrade also introduces what Intron describes as the world’s first bilingual Swahili English automatic speech recognition model capable of handling code switching, a common pattern in African conversations where speakers switch between languages within a single discussion.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the company, Tobi Olatunji, explained that Sahara v2 was trained using locally sourced voice datasets curated from across the continent. The company said benchmark tests conducted using African voice datasets showed the system outperforming global models such as Gemini, GPT-4 and Whisper in recognising African names, organisations and locations, while also delivering stronger performance in noisy environments and multi speaker conversations.
Founded in 2020 by Olatunji and Olakunle Asekun, Intron initially developed clinical documentation tools before expanding into broader voice infrastructure. The Sahara platform now powers speech to text, text to speech and voice authentication systems used by enterprise and government clients in countries including Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda and Uganda, positioning the startup as one of the emerging builders of Africa’s voice technology ecosystem.