New Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge gives developers early access to code-switching speech APIs, open African datasets and a $10,000 prize pool to build voice AI for how Africans actually speak
Lagos, Nigeria — 4 August 2026 — Africa rarely speaks one language at a time. A customer may begin a sentence in English and finish it in Yoruba. A clinician may move between Swahili and English while explaining a diagnosis. Friends, families and colleagues blend languages naturally to express context, identity and meaning. Most voice AI systems still struggle to follow.
Yesterday, at the Deep Learning Indaba, Intron, in collaboration with MLC (Africa) Agentic AI Workshop launched the Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge, an ecosystem-wide competition calling on developers, researchers, startups and product teams to build voice applications for how Africans actually speak. The response was immediate: 97 teams from 19 countries registered on the ffirst day, with participants building solutions across health, fintech, contact centres and other high-impact sectors.
Intron is an Africa-focused voice AI company building speech-recognition and text-to-speech APIs for African languages, accents and multilingual conversations. Its technology helps organisations turn speech into usable data, power natural voice interactions and automate workflows across healthcare, financial services, customer experience, legal services and public-sector applications.
