Nigerian AI startup Intron Health raises $1.6M to strengthen its African languages speech recognition tool
Intron Health, a Nigerian tech startup that provides speech recognition for healthcare workers in Africa, has raised $1.6M in a pre-seed funding round.
The round was led by Microtraction, with participation from Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, and Baker Bridge Capital. The investment also saw contributions from angel investors from global companies, including Google, CLEAR Global, NYU, and Optum.
Intron Health plans to use the new funding to deepen its research efforts, strengthen cloud-native and on-prem capabilities, and expand distribution. The company says it will also bolster its team by recruiting tech talent to support product development and market expansion, driving continued progress and breaking further technological barriers.
Launched in 2020 by Tobi Olatunji, Intron Health helps healthcare workers digitize medical records by medical reconverting speech into text. The startup has developed Africa’s first clinical speech recognition platform, which it claims boasts up to 92% accuracy rate on medical terminology with heavy accents. This platform helps doctors across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and most recently Uganda complete documentation seven times faster, significantly accelerating the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and reducing the administrative burden.
‘‘We are not only improving efficiency but also enhancing health outcomes and positively impacting hospital finances. With the backing of prominent global investors who bring deep knowledge and expertise, we are looking forward to our next phase of growth.’’ Tobi Olatunji, Founder and CEO of Intron Health said.
Voice technology has advanced rapidly globally and now plays a pivotal role in various industries– automating call centre operations, generating social media content, biometric verification, voice bots for mental health and patient education, and eliminating several hours of clinical documentation through ambient listening. Productivity tools such as clinical automatic speech recognition (ASR) are ubiquitous in developed markets. However, with over 3,000 of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages and dialects in Africa, many African and minority languages and accents remain excluded from global speech advancements.
Intron Health’s advanced speech recognition platform is bridging this gap by supporting a diverse range of African languages, and accents, recognising local names and accurately transcribing medical terminologies online and offline.
To solve the massive problem with various accents and languages, Intron Health created Africa’s largest clinical speech dataset, a proprietary warchest of over 3.5 million audio clips across multiple specialities and domains, covering 288 accents from over 18,000 contributors from 29 countries. This vast dataset has enabled the company to train its algorithms for deployment in any hospital with minimal additional model fine-tuning. Accessible via any device through a browser, Intron Health’s speech-to-text real-time AI transcription converts spoken information into text allowing healthcare providers to easily enter data into electronic medical records, saving time and improving productivity.
Intron Health’s speech recognition solution is proving transformative even beyond healthcare and the company is keen to explore potential use cases and opportunities for the transformative power of localised voice technology in and beyond Africa.
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