Intron Health is exploring new growth frontiers backed by a $1.6 million pre-seed round, led by Microtraction, with participation from several other ventures and angel investors. The startup is working on perfecting noise cancellation, ensuring the platform works well in low bandwidths, enabling the transcription of multi-speaker conversations, and integrating text-to-speech capabilities. The plan is to add intelligence systems or decision support tools for tasks such as prescription or lab tests to help reduce doctor errors, ensure adequate patient care, and speed up their work. Intron Health is also partnering with Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Digital Square at PATH to evaluate popular large language models across 15 countries.
Key takeaways:
- Tobi Olatunji, founder and CEO of Intron Health, is working to bridge the gap in voice recognition technology for speakers of minority languages, those with thick accents, and individuals with speech disorders.
- Intron Health claims to have Africa’s largest clinical speech database, with its algorithm trained on 3.5 million audio clips from over 18,000 contributors, mainly healthcare practitioners, representing 29 countries and 288 accents.
- The original aim of Intron Health, launched in 2020, was to digitize hospital operations in Africa through an electronic medical record (EMR) system. However, due to challenges in adoption, the company shifted focus to improving physicians’ basic data entry and writing work.
- Intron Health has partnered with Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Digital Square at PATH to evaluate popular large language models across 15 countries, aiming to ensure that culturally attuned models are available for African clinics and hospitals.