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 Modupe Gbadeyanka
The Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Mr Aminu Maida, has reemphasised the need to protect the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure, especially fibre networks, noting that damage to fibre networks carries significant economic consequences.
Speaking virtually at the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) Critical Conversation Forum on Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) in Lagos recently, he described FTTH as a critical enabler of Nigeria’s digital future.
“FTTH is uniquely positioned to meet Nigerians' next phase of data demand. The quality of our broadband will increasingly shape the competitiveness of our businesses, the growth of our digital industry and the opportunities available to our citizens,” the NCC chief stated.
“We must uphold deployment standards. Nigeria needs fibre that is properly installed, properly documented, and properly protected,” Mr Maida further said at the event themed Fibre to the Home in Nigeria: Addressing Challenges, Strengthening Standards and Ensuring Sustainable Deployment.
During a panel discussion titled Policy, Governance and Regulatory Alignment, the Deputy Director of Strategic Business Initiatives at ipNX, Mr Segun Okuneye, highlighted the need for stronger collaboration across the telecommunications ecosystem to unlock the full potential of fibre broadband in Nigeria.
According to him, sustainable fibre deployment extends beyond technology and investment to include policy consistency, stakeholder alignment, infrastructure protection, and shared responsibility.
“Achieving universal fibre connectivity requires more than deploying infrastructure; it requires sustained collaboration between operators, regulators, government agencies and host communities.
“When policies are aligned, deployment standards are consistently enforced, and critical infrastructure is protected, we create an environment where investment thrives and more Nigerians can enjoy reliable, high-speed broadband.
“At ipNX, we remain committed to working with all stakeholders to build resilient digital infrastructure that will support Nigeria’s economic growth for generations to come.”
Earlier in his welcome address, ATCON President, Mr Tony Emoekpere, underscored the strategic importance of FTTH in achieving the country’s broadband penetration targets while calling for greater public awareness around protecting communications infrastructure.
“This forum is critical because Fibre-to-the-Home is the technology that will enable the country to achieve full broadband penetration. We all depend on communication infrastructure, and it must be protected,” he declared.
Drawing a comparison with power infrastructure in the country, he added, “If somebody comes to your neighbourhood to tamper with your transformer or power cables, everybody will come out. The same thing needs to apply for communications infrastructure. When we see people damaging fibre cables, we should raise an alarm.”
By Modupe Gbadeyanka
Thursday, July 23, 2026, provided an opportunity for financial services professionals to converge on Landmark Event Centre, Lagos, to brainstorm on ways to meet the rising customers’ expectations.
The platform used for this purpose was Core by Interswitch. It is part of the company’s broader commitment to strengthening Africa’s digital payments ecosystem by fostering collaboration, knowledge sharing and operational excellence across the financial services value chain.
At the event, participants, numbering over 400, also highlighted the growing importance of operational excellence in sustaining resilient payment infrastructure.
As digital financial services continue to expand across Africa, closer collaboration among financial institutions, fintechs and payment service providers will be essential to improving responsiveness, resolving operational challenges more effectively and delivering consistently reliable customer experiences.
The Executive Vice President for Operations and Technology at Interswitch, Mr Babafemi Ogungbamila, said the forum reflects the company’s belief that exceptional customer experiences are built not only on innovative technology but also on the expertise, collaboration and commitment of the professionals who keep payment systems running every day.
“Every successful digital transaction is powered by professionals whose work often goes unseen but is fundamental to building trust in digital payments. Core by Interswitch was created to recognise their contribution, strengthen collaboration across the industry and create opportunities for shared learning that ultimately benefit financial institutions and the customers they serve.
“As digital payments continue to evolve, investing in the people and processes that power the technology is just as important as investing in the technology itself,” Mr Ogungbamila said.
Beyond recognising the professionals whose work often goes unnoticed, the programme underscored the value of creating stronger connections across the payments ecosystem.
By creating a dedicated platform for knowledge sharing, collaboration and professional development, Core by Interswitch aims to build a more connected community of payments operations professionals equipped to respond to the evolving demands of the digital economy.
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
WhatsApp has been updated with a web calling feature, allowing users to now make and receive audio and video calls, both one-on-one and group, directly from WhatsApp Web.
A notice from the Meta-owned messaging platform disclosed that this feature works without the need to download any app.
It was disclosed that this update was made to WhatsApp to make it easier for users to make calls wherever they are and on whatever device, phone or laptop.
Users will have access to features available on their other devices, including screen sharing, reactions, and a dedicated Calls tab with full call history and favourites, all from their browsers.
WhatsApp noted that calls from this feature are end-to-end encrypted, with no time limits and at no cost, as it is the same private experience they expect from the platform.
WhatsApp has also been embedded with easy call transfer, enabling the movement of an active group call from one device to another without hanging up. Users can seamlessly transfer calls to WhatsApp Web or Desktop when they arrive home to collaborate on a larger screen – or vice versa.
The platform further said it now has QuickHD, which allows for an improved video experience at the beginning of a call. With QuickHD, users can now enjoy high-definition video immediately in the very first few seconds of the call.
In addition, it has launched noise suppression to remove the background noise around callers so their voices come through clearly to the person on the other end, even in loud or busy environments. This can be managed at any time in in-call settings.
WhatsApp said these features are rolling out gradually and will be available to everyone soon, expressing its desire to make WhatsApp calling simpler to use.
