Voice tech startup Intron launches AI models in the midst of broader sector expansion.

Intron is a Nigerian AI firm that provides speech-to text transcription tools for healthcare professionals. It has expanded its services outside the health sector.

The launch coincides with the development of multiple high-demand tools in various sectors by African startups to create additional revenue streams, amid tighter funding and increasing investor expectations. This strategy is gaining traction in Africa’s tech industry, similar to how PaidHR diversified its product offerings to diversify revenue streams last year. Intron’s decision reflects a similar strategy.

Intron introduces three core models: Sahara Voice-Lock is an intelligent voice authentication tool that can detect fraud and deepfakes. Sahara Voice-TTS is a text to speech system with over 80 voices in more than 40 accents. Intron’s CEO, Tobi Olatunji said that the company was born in busy hospital wards where background noise and limited resources made accurate speech detection a daily struggle. “We built our technology for the toughest environment first, and it scales easily to courts, call centers, and content creators.” It has since expanded its capabilities by offering voice-AI products to Ogun State Judiciary, Nigeria to reduce the burden of manual note-taking. It also provides human-like conversational voices for call centres within the digital finance sector. Intron wants to be the voice infrastructure layer for startups, government institutions, and enterprises in Africa. Openai might not meet these specific needs.

Olatunji said, “Rather than railing against Big Tech’s model bias, why don’t we build better models?”

In July 2024, the startup raised $1.6 in a preseed round. Intron is currently training a new generation Sahara-Titan, which it hopes will be capable of understanding, trancribing, and translating twenty major African language such as Swahili. Intron is also training the Sahara Primus model, which it hopes will produce fluent and natural sounding speech in twenty languages.

It is a question of whether more African startups continue to adopt a non-industry-specific approach and build for broader audience to keep revenue flowing and remain financially sustainable in a funding landscape that is becoming increasingly challenging. Mark your calendars