Yoruba son builds machine that interprets 500 dialects, 20 languages
By Samuel Ogunsona
In a remarkable move, a Yoruba medical personnel has built a machine that understands and interprets no fewer than 500 dialects and 20 languages making medical enquiry easier for health workers.
The equipment saves doctors three hours daily of work hours
The Yoruba healthtech founder, Tobi Olatunji has tackled what has been one of the most overlooked burdens on African healthcare, clinical documentation.
Through his startup Intron Health, he has built a speech-to-text platform that understands more than 500 African accents and over 20 languages, allowing doctors to dictate notes instead of typing them.
Tobi Olatunji did not start Intron Health to build another transcription tool. He started it to fix a quiet crisis in African hospitals, doctors spending hours typing notes instead of treating patients.
His platform listens to clinical speech across more than 500 African accents and over 20 languages, and turns it into accurate text in real time.
In hospitals where the startup is already deployed, the result has been immediate. Radiology reports that previously took up to 48 hours to be documented and returned can now be completed in about 20 minutes.
Physicians using the system are reclaiming an average of three hours each day previously lost to documentation.
The product has now reached over 30 hospitals, backed by $1.6 million in funding, but Olatunji says the bigger mission is infrastructure. Most global speech models struggle with African English, Yoruba, Swahili, Hausa and African French. Intron Health was trained from the ground up to understand how Africans actually speak in the clinic.
For Olatunji, the vision is simple: a future where a doctor in Lagos, Nairobi or Dakar does not have to anglicize his voice to be understood by technology, and where voice becomes the fastest path to care.
