AI voice startup Intella just launched Swahili language services
Intella CEO Nour Taher announce new Swahili capabilities at the Africa Forward Summit
#Kenya #AIvoice - Riyadh- and Cairo-based speech intelligence company Intella this week announced its launch of Swahili language services. Sharing the stage with Orange CEO Christel Heydemann at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Intella CEO Nour Taher announced the availability of new Swahili capabilities for the company’s Ziila AI assistant. Co-hosted by Presidents William Ruto and Emmanuel Macron, the summit brought together over 30 African heads of state alongside global leaders, investors, and innovators shaping the continent’s future. Intella used the event to stake its claim to the Middle East and Africa’s AI voice market of two billion people.
SO WHAT? – Delivering AI voice services in Swahili is much harder than it sounds. Despite being spoken by over 200 million people across East Africa, Swahili is classified as a low-resource language in AI development. High-quality, large-scale digital datasets in Swahili suitable for training large language models are scarce compared with those in high-resource languages such as English, French or Chinese. Since mainstream LLMs are predominantly trained on English-dominant data, Swahili outputs from global AI models frequently suffer from inaccuracy, cultural irrelevance and poor linguistic structure. Intella’s production-grade Swahili capability is therefore a significant technical achievement in addition to the enormous potential impact it will have on customer service and digital commerce in Africa’s Swahili speaking markets.
KEY POINTS:
Egypt and Saudi Arabia-based speech intelligence company Intella has announced new Swahili language capabilities for its platform, allowing its Ziila AI voice assistant to speak and understand Swahili. The announcement was made one stage together with Orange, a strategic partner for Intella in Africa.
Speaking at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Intella CEO Nour Taher announced the the live deployment of the Swahili language to the company’s platform and inclusion in its Ziila AI assistant. She also staked Intella’s claim to the Middle East and Africa’s AI voice market of two billion people.
Co-hosted by Presidents William Ruto and Emmanuel Macron, the summit brought together over 30 African heads of state alongside global leaders, investors, and innovators shaping the continent’s future.
Last year Intella launched the first Arabic language voice ordering system using Egyptian dialect together with e-commerce platform Jumia Egypt. The service allows customers in Egypt to shop through natural speech commands via Intella’s Ziila intelligent assistant.
Intella’s platform allows users to browse and purchase products by speaking naturally, eliminating typing and manual searches whilst targeting Egypt's preference for voice interaction over traditional navigation methods.
In April, Intella launched Ziila in Morocco, providing the technology to allow customers to converse with the AI assistant in Moroccan Darija, French or English, with the ability to seamlessly switch languages mid-conversation.
This week, Intella demonstrated a Swahili-speaking Ziila at the Africa Forward Summit, with the ability to switch between Arabic, English, French and Swahili seamlessly during a customer conversation.
ZOOM OUT – Intella’s Africa expansion builds on 2025’s growth and funding, when the company raised a $12.5 million Series A round led by Dutch investment firm Prosus Ventures. The oversubscribed round drew participation from 500 Global, Saudi investor Idrisi Ventures, HearstLab, Wa’ed Ventures and Hala Ventures, bringing total funding raised to over $16.9 million. That round was raised on the strength of Intella’s Arabic speech capabilities and specifically its proprietary speech-to-text models. The company boasts a 95.73% accuracy rate across more than 25 Arabic dialects, outperforming established global competitors in a language that mainstream AI models have consistently struggled with.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Read more about Intela:
Arabic speech pioneer secures $12.5m Series A funding (Middle East AI News)
Jumia Egypt launches Arabic voice ecommerce (Middle East AI News)