Hi, welcome to Tech This Evening, an After-Work Tech Newsletter from Techparley Africa. Sure, there is a lot to unpack right now. Sit back, while I walk you through.
Top Story: Nigerian Startup, Intron, Expands AI Speech Recognition Platform to 57 Languages
Nigerian artificial intelligence startup, Intron, has expanded its speech recognition platform, Sahara, to support 57 languages, adding 24 new languages as the company accelerates efforts to build voice technology tailored to African speech patterns.
The latest upgrade, Sahara v2, supports 23 African languages within the overall total and recognises more than 500 African accents, marking one of the most extensive speech recognition systems built specifically for the continent.
Among the newly added languages are Hausa, Swahili, isiZulu, Yoruba, Kinyarwanda, Twi, Igbo, isiXhosa, African French, Amharic, Bemba, Luganda, Oromo, Pidgin, Shona, and Wolof.
Founded in 2020 by Tobi Olatunji and Olakunle Asekun, the company said language selection was largely driven by enterprise demand and commercial use cases across sectors such as healthcare, legal services, financial services, and telecommunications.
“We curated datasets of African voices, combining publicly available datasets with our in-house collection, and made them available so anyone can test global models on African speech,” Tobi Olatunji, founder and CEO of Intron, said.
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On Startup Spotlight:
Nigerian Edtech Startup, Lena, Uses Games and AI to Keep Children Engaged in School Subjects
Founded by Danny Ombeh and Faruk Bilesanmi, Nigerian startup, Lena, is turning school curricula into immersive games in a bid to reshape how children learn foundational subjects.
Both founders initially connected through freelance work on Fiverr, collaborating on digital projects for clients in Nigeria and abroad. Like many young builders testing their skills in the global gig economy, they started by solving practical problems for clients.
But over time, their professional collaboration evolved into a deeper partnership centred on building startups.
“Faruk and I have been building together since 2020 when we started working on freelance projects for clients in Nigeria and abroad,” Ombeh recalls. “And over time, we became a lot more interested in startups and actually solving real problems.”
That shared ambition eventually led to Lena, an education technology startup that aims to help children master foundational subjects such as mathematics, literacy, and science through immersive digital games.
Quadri Adejumo brings you all the details. Read here.
Also Read:
Kenya’s Roam Launches ‘Explorer’ Platform to Bring Real-Time Intelligence to Africa’s Electric Vehicles. Yakub Abdulrasheed brings us the details, here.
Quote of the Day:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke.
Thank you for joining me yet again this evening. Stay safe, and see you tomorrow for the next tech newsletter.
Best, Quadri
