Nigerian Startup Intron Health Secures $1.6 Million in Pre-Seed Funding
Intron Health, a clinical speech recognition startup, has raised $1.6 million (N2.55 billion) in pre-seed funding to advance the development and deployment of its innovative speech recognition tool, designed to understand African accents.
The funding round was led by Microtraction, with significant participation from Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, Baker Bridge Capital, and several angel investors.
With the new funding, Intron Health said it would explore further advancements, including perfecting noise cancellation, ensuring platform functionality in low bandwidth environments, enabling the transcription of multi-speaker conversations, and integrating text-to-speech capabilities.
Tobi Olatunji, founder and CEO of clinical speech-recognition startup Intron Health, wants to bridge this gap. He claims that Intron is Africa’s largest clinical speech database, with its algorithm trained on 3.5 million audio clips (16,000 hours) from over 18,000 contributors, mainly healthcare practitioners, representing 29 countries and 288 accents. Olatunji says that drawing most of its contributors from the healthcare sector ensures that medical terms are pronounced and captured correctly for his target markets.
“Because we’ve already trained on many African accents, it’s very likely that the baseline performance of their access will be much better than any other service they use,” he said, adding that data from Ghana, Uganda and South Africa is growing and that the startup is confident about deploying the model there.
Intron Health’s Speech to text app is a beacon of innovation, effectively addressing the limitations found in mainstream alternatives such as Siri and Google Translator. In 2023, the startup announced a partnership with AI giant company Nvidia and other leading AI and language-focused companies. Together, they launched the Intron AfriSpeech-200 Automatic Speech Recognition Challenge, a groundbreaking initiative aimed at advancing the development of speech recognition technology in African accents.
Let’s delve into the striking differentiation that sets Intron Health apart;
- Accent Identification
Most speech-to-text solutions, including Siri, are primarily tailored for Western accents, leading to significant inaccuracies when dealing with African accents which is something that we can term to be Siri’s Struggle. In sharp contrast, Intron Health boasts a diverse database of 200+ African accents, making it highly proficient in transcribing even the thickest of these accents.
- Complex African Names
Common African names like Chiamaka, Olorunleke, or Rukaiyat often leave Google translator while, on the other hand, Intron is uniquely designed to recognize and accurately transcribe complex African names with precision.
- Medical Terminology Proficiency
Siri and its counterparts are ill-suited for the complex, specialty-specific medical terminologies and abbreviations, especially when intertwined with heavy African accents.
Considering Intron Health Speech to text app, it is specifically engineered to excel in transcribing intricate medical terminologies, even when expressed in thick African accents.
- Internet Dependency
Traditional speech-to-text systems, including Alexa, Google translator or Siri, heavily rely on uninterrupted internet connectivity. Now, that’s their Achilles’ Heel.
Intron Health’s Transcribe app represents a monumental leap in speech recognition technology especially for Africans, bridging the gaps left by mainstream alternatives and revolutionizing the way healthcare professionals interact with Electronic Medical Records.
