Technology
Intron Incorporates Africa-centric Voice AI into Ogun Judiciary, Others
By Adedapo Adesanya
Africa-centric voice technology platform, Intron, has announced its integration into several platforms, including legal services, patient care, and customer experiences across Africa.
The company, which has built a suite of best-in-class speech recognition and text-to-speech AI models specifically for African voices and accents, launched its clinical speech recognition platform in 2022 for hospitals and health ministries throughout Africa. Since then, Intron’s capabilities have expanded, offering advanced real-time voice AI solutions across key sectors, including financial services, telecommunications, legal and government agencies.
According to a statement, these solutions are already driving tangible impact and powering voice applications which outperforms giants like OpenAI, Azure, Google, and AWS at recognising African accents.
Earlier this year, the Ogun State Judiciary adopted Intron Sahara to alleviate the burdens of manual note-taking during court proceedings, allowing judges to focus entirely on the dialogue in the courtroom, enhancing attention, accuracy, and speed.
Testifying to this, the Office of the Chief Registrar, Ogun State High Court said, “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,”
Sahara has significantly reduced session times, enabling more cases to be heard and expediting the delivery of justice. Focusing on speech AI, Sahara tackles these challenges directly with models trained on local data, accurately recognising heavily accented African names, currencies, numbers, decimals and technical terms where imported platforms fall short.
Also, Rwanda’s Ministry of Health tapped Intron to accelerate the nationwide rollout of its home-grown electronic medical records, using voice-driven documentation and automated translation to ease adoption for clinicians.
At EHA Clinics, a leading hospital with locations in Abuja, Kano, and Lagos, Nigeria, Sahara models cut clinical note times down to 57 seconds for a roughly 100-word report, improving the quality and detail of clinical notes in far less time.
C-Care, Uganda’s largest private hospital network, is also leveraging Sahara to cut patient wait times, reduce errors, and ease documentation across its 20+ hospitals and clinics. Intron also collaborates with several enterprises and organisations like 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– each driving meaningful and innovative AI applications across Africa.
Digital finance platform, Branch International, is collaborating with Intron to personalise after-hours outbound engagement, improving responsiveness and customer experience using Sahara CX Intelligence–advanced low-latency human-like conversational voice agents.
Sahara is built on a proprietary dataset of more than 3.5 million audio clips from over 18,000 speakers across 30+ countries, powered by Intron’s patented AccentMix algorithm and years of focused R&D. Intron’s speech-to-text models recognise over 300 distinct African accents and dialects, from Ghanaian English to Zulu-inflected speech. Its deep exposure to African speech patterns also enables stronger performance on North African and Arabic-English accents, surpassing expectations beyond its explicit training, outperforming several frontier voice AI models.
On the back of this breakthrough and most-recent warchest of over 30,000 hours of local language data in 64+ languages from over 32,000 speakers, Intron is training its next-generation Sahara-Titan model, a single advanced AI model that can understand, transcribe, and translate between 20 of Africa’s top languages like Swahili, Hausa, and Zulu.
Similarly, Sahara-Primus will be able to generate fluent, high-quality, and natural-sounding speech in 20 African languages–advanced models that are long overdue and in high demand, ushering in a new era of compelling user experiences across the continent.
Speaking further on this, Mr Tobi Olatunji, CEO of Intron, says, “Intron represents a future where no community is left behind by technology. 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. Rather than rail against Big Tech model bias, why not build better models?”
“Intron was born in the busiest hospital wards, where background noise and scarce resources made accurate speech recognition a daily battle. We built for the hardest environment first, and now our technology scales effortlessly to courts, call centres and content creators. I’m proud of what our team has achieved – but we’re not alone. African AI is rising fast, built by local talent and data. Now is the moment to support, build and buy African so no community is left behind,” he added.
Following a $1.6 million pre-seed raise in 2024, Intron has accelerated R&D, bolstered both cloud-native and on-premises deployments, and continues to grow its Research, Engineering, and Growth teams. The company now serves over 40 organisations across 8 countries, the company continues to evolve from its roots in healthcare, becoming the voice-infrastructure layer of choice for startups and enterprises across Africa.
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
The reach of the Meta Business Agent is being expanded to Instagram and other platforms of the social media giant.
Meta Business Agent is an artificial intelligence (AI) that allows business owners to attend to customers’ needs with ease.
Customers expect instant responses, but no team can be everywhere at once. This innovation handles such without hassles.
It helps businesses to answer questions specific to the business, makes product recommendations from the catalogue, books appointments, qualifies incoming leads, and closes sales.
More than one million businesses are already using a Meta Business Agent on WhatsApp and Messenger to respond to customers around the clock.
“We’re now expanding our Business Agent to businesses big and small globally, so within minutes you can have yours up and running, responding in your customer’s local language using your tone,” Meta said in a statement.
“We’re also expanding these agents to Instagram since businesses connect with their customers there, too. Businesses can activate their Business Agent here. Getting started with the Business Agent is free. In the coming months, businesses will access the agent through our paid subscription offerings, with options for businesses of every size,” it added.
Meta also stated that it is making it simpler for people to discover businesses powered by a Meta Business Agent directly on WhatsApp. It noted that starting soon, people will be able to find businesses by typing their name in the Search bar, or by sharing their phone number or contact card in chats with friends and family. This way, when more customers reach out, they get a quick, helpful response.
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Lagos State government plans to expand the city’s data centre capacity to over 250 megawatts (MW) by 2030 as part of efforts to strengthen its digital infrastructure ecosystem.
This was disclosed by the state’s Commissioner for Innovation, Science, and Technology, Mr Olatubosun Alake, at the launch of the Kasi Cloud LOS1 data centre facility in Lekki. Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) invested in Kasi Cloud through an $8 million convertible loan note in 2021.
Mr Alake said Lagos already hosts nearly three-quarters of Nigeria’s commercial data centre capacity, adding that the government intends to expand its infrastructure footprint significantly over the next five years.
“There are about 146 additional megawatt data centres planned in the pipeline,” he said. “We envisage that by 2030, we would have over 250 megawatts of data centre capacity in Lagos, three times the current capacity growth.”
The expansion comes as demand for cloud services, AI computing power, and local data storage continues to grow across Nigeria’s digital economy, with Lagos at the forefront, housing thousands of businesses and startups.
Mr Alake said the Kasi Cloud facility represents Lagos’ entry into “large-scale hyperscale AI infrastructure,” signalling the state’s ambition to evolve beyond being known primarily as a startup hub into a major centre for digital infrastructure and AI computing.
“Lagos is no longer simply a startup city,” he said. “It is an infrastructure city.”
The Kasi LOS1 facility is designed as a 40MW hyperscale data centre campus, beginning operations with an initial 7.2MW IT load.
According to Mr Alake, the facility includes advanced GPU computing infrastructure powered by Nvidia H100 and H200 chips, alongside liquid cooling systems and cloud infrastructure services designed to support AI workloads.
The Lagos State government believes such infrastructure will become critical as AI adoption accelerates globally.
Mr Alake said the state is investing in fibre optic networks, smart city technologies, university innovation programmes, and digital government systems to prepare for the transition.
“The AI economy is going to require hundreds of megawatts,” he said. “The market has already made its decision about where digital infrastructure belongs.”
On his part, Mr Johnson Agbogun, co-founder and chief executive officer of Kasi Cloud, said the project was built to reduce Nigeria’s dependence on foreign cloud infrastructure and give African businesses more control over how their data and AI systems are developed.
“Nigerian enterprises are currently spending $850 million every year on foreign cloud infrastructure,” he said. “Every naira spent abroad on cloud and AI infrastructure helps build capabilities somewhere else.”
He added that the facility runs GPU-powered AI workloads from local enterprises and described the Lekki campus as “the beginning of Nigeria’s AI factory.”
“As artificial intelligence reshapes economies globally, the nations that control their own compute infrastructure and data will be the ones positioned to lead,” added Mr Kolawole Owodunni, NSIA’s Executive Director and Chief Information Officer.
The goal of Google Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind. Whether it is a quick fact to help with your daily hustle or a complex question about starting a new business, Nigerians rely on Search every single day.
Over the last year, Google has rapidly reimagined what Search can do with AI. The momentum has been incredible—just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users globally. As people have realised just how much more Search can do for them, they are searching more than ever before, reaching an all-time high in search queries last quarter. Today at Google I/O, Google shared the next step in its journey to bring together the best of a search engine with the best of AI.
To power this next chapter, Google is officially upgrading Search with Gemini 3.5 Flash as the new default model in AI Mode for everyone worldwide. Delivering sustained frontier performance for agents and coding, Gemini 3.5 Flash is the engine driving the new era of AI-powered Search. Because curiosity doesn’t always fit into standard keywords, this powerful AI model is transforming Search from a tool that simply finds information into an intelligent platform capable of reasoning, monitoring the web, and executing complex tasks on your behalf.
Here is a look at the four biggest AI-powered announcements coming to Google Search:
1. A Completely Reimagined Search Box
Google is introducing the biggest upgrade to its Search box in over 25 years. Now completely reimagined with AI, the new intelligent Search box dynamically expands to give you the space to describe exactly what you need. It goes beyond simple autocomplete by anticipating your intent and helping you phrase your questions. You are no longer limited to typing; you can now search using text, images, files, videos, or even Chrome tabs as inputs. Additionally, Google is making it easier to ask follow-up questions directly from an AI Overview, flowing naturally into a conversational back-and-forth where your context stays with you as you explore.
2. New Search Agents That Work in the Background
We are entering the era of Search agents, where you can create and manage multiple AI agents directly in Search. Google is launching “Information agents” that operate in the background 24/7. These agents intelligently scan the web—alongside fresh data on finance, shopping, and sports—to monitor for changes related to your specific questions. For example, if you are house hunting, your agent will continuously scan the market and notify you the moment a listing matches your exact criteria. Furthermore, Search is expanding its agentic booking capabilities; you can soon share specific criteria (like a late-night private karaoke room) and Search will pull the latest pricing and links to finish booking. For certain categories, Google can even call businesses on your behalf.
3. Custom Mini-Apps and Visuals Built Just for You
Search is no longer just returning links; it is now building the ideal response in the perfect format for your query entirely on the fly. By bringing the power of Google Antigravity and the agentic coding capabilities of Gemini 3.5 Flash into Search, users will get a custom “Generative UI.” This means Search can design custom layouts, interactive visuals, tables, graphs, or simulations in real-time. But it goes a step further: if you have an ongoing task, like establishing a new health routine, Search can actually code a custom fitness tracker or mini-app for you. These custom dashboards tap into real-time sources like live maps and weather, giving you a personalised tracker you can return to again and again.
4. Expanded Personal Intelligence Without a Subscription
For AI to be truly helpful, it shouldn’t just know the world’s information—it should understand your personal context, too. To achieve this, Google is expanding Personal Intelligence in AI Mode to more people in nearly 200 countries and territories across 98 languages. Crucially, this is being rolled out with no subscription required. Users can securely connect apps like Gmail, Google Photos, and soon Google Calendar directly to Search. Designed with transparency and choice at its heart, this allows you to safely ask Search to find information buried in your own personal files, always keeping you in complete control of your connected data.
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