Riyadh- and Cairo-based speech intelligence company Intella has launched Swahili language capabilities for its AI voice platform, expanding the reach of its Ziila assistant into East Africa as the company targets the Middle East and Africa’s two billion-person AI voice market.
The announcement was made at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, where Intella CEO Nour Taher shared the stage with Orange CEO Christel Heydemann. Co-hosted by Kenyan President William Ruto and French President Emmanuel Macron, the summit brought together more than 30 African heads of state alongside global leaders, investors and innovators shaping the continent’s future.
Delivering AI voice services in Swahili is technically harder than it sounds. Despite being spoken by more than 200 million people across East Africa, Swahili is classified as a low-resource language in AI development — high-quality, large-scale digital datasets suitable for training large language models are scarce compared with those for English, French or Chinese. Because 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 therefore represents both a meaningful technical achievement and a significant commercial opportunity in Africa’s Swahili-speaking markets.
The Swahili rollout adds to a series of language milestones for Intella. Last year, the company launched the first Arabic-language voice ordering system using Egyptian dialect together with e-commerce platform Jumia Egypt, allowing customers to shop through natural speech commands via Ziila. The platform lets users browse and purchase products by speaking naturally, eliminating the need for typing or manual searches.
In April, Intella launched Ziila in Morocco, enabling customers to converse with the assistant in Moroccan Darija, French or English — and to 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 single customer interaction.
Intella’s Africa expansion builds on its 2025 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 more than $16.9 million.
That round was raised on the strength of Intella’s Arabic speech capabilities, particularly its proprietary speech-to-text models. The company has reported 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.
