Nigerian Voice AI Startup Intron Launches Sahara v2.5 for African Languages

Nigerian voice AI startup Intron has launched Sahara v2.5, an updated voice AI platform designed to handle conversations where people switch between English, French and African languages. The release expands Sahara’s speech recognition, text-to-speech and voice-agent capabilities, taking its coverage to 31 African languages. Intron says the update is designed to improve accuracy when users move between languages during the same conversation.

Sahara Expands Multilingual Voice Recognition

Sahara v2.5 includes bilingual code-switching speech recognition across 12 African languages, including Zulu, Hausa, Swahili, Luganda, Yoruba and Nigerian Pidgin. Intron has also introduced a trilingual model covering Kinyarwanda, English and French. The company says it has filed US patents covering the technology. According to Intron’s own benchmarks, Sahara outperformed Gemini, ElevenLabs and Meta in code-switched speech recognition across the 12 languages tested.

The update also brings language-mixing capabilities to text-to-speech and voice-agent applications. Intron says Sahara performed better than ElevenLabs and Gemini in 11 of 13 languages tested for these applications. The company has also added recognition support for Nupe, Kanuri, Nigerian Fulfulde, Tigrinya, Kikuyu, Dholuo and Somali. Sahara v2.5 includes streaming speech recognition and text-to-speech APIs for applications such as live captions, real-time assistants and customer service systems.

Enterprise Use and Expansion

Intron is targeting sectors including healthcare, financial services, legal services, government and contact centres. Its existing deployments include voice tools for Branch International’s collections operations, projects with Audere Africa, transcription systems for the Ogun State Judiciary and medical documentation workflows in East Africa.

The company also has offline models running on Nvidia hardware at PAMO Clinics in Port Harcourt, allowing organisations to process voice data locally where connectivity, privacy or regulatory requirements make cloud deployment less suitable. Intron says Sahara now serves more than 40 enterprise customers across six African countries, including Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda and Ghana. The company raised $1.6 million in pre-seed funding in 2024 and has since expanded its training dataset to more than 150,000 hours of African-language audio from over 53,000 speakers. The dataset covers 64 languages and more than 500 accents.