Deadline: September 15, 2026
Applications are open for the Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge 2026. The Challenge invites developers, startups, researchers, product teams, and builders across Africa to help solve one of the biggest unsolved problems in voice AI. Use Sahara’s new code-switching APIs. Build real applications. Benchmark what works. Help surface how well current speech models handle code-switched audio in real-world settings.
The Challenge Task: Create or improve a real-world voice AI application
The transcript received can be used to perform a downstream task. Examples include a voice assistant that completes a booking, a voice-driven triage tool, a spoken-language form-filler, or a voice interface that takes an action on a user’s behalf.
Categories
Five tracks designed for real-world impact across Africa.
- Health: Clinical documentation, patient intake, community health, maternal health, public health, hospital workflows, and frontline care.
- Legal & Public Services: Court transcription, legal aid, citizen services, civic reporting, complaints, justice access, and public-sector workflows.
- Fintech, Telco & Customer Experience: Voice banking, KYC, payments, collections, customer support, call centers, agent assist, and customer insights.
- Agriculture & Education: Farmer advisory, extension services, tutoring, classroom learning, local-language education, and skills training.
- Other High-Impact Use Cases: Humanitarian response, accessibility, media, religious services, commerce, transport, culture, and any meaningful use of code-switching voice AI.
Prizes
- $10,000 Total Cash Prize Pool: Cash prizes will be awarded to top-performing solutions across the challenge categories.
Top Teams will also receive:
- Partner Demo Day: Access for top teams
- Greater Visibility: With sponsors, judges, funders and ecosystem partners
- Pilot Opportunities: Potential pilot or deployment conversations
- Sahara API Credits: Additional resources to continue building
- Recognition: Across Intron and partner channels
Eligibility
- Open to builders across Africa and the diaspora. Apply as a solo builder or as a team.
- They especially encourage:
- Developers & engineers
- AI/ML researchers
- Startups & product teams
- Student teams
- Open-source builders
- NGOs & civic-tech teams
- Companies with voice or customer-facing workflows
Application
Each submission must:
- Use voice to achieve a downstream task (the agentic component), not simply convert speech to text.
- Benchmark performance on code-switched audio input across at least three speech models, including an Intron Sahara API, and at least two other models of the team’s choice (global, local, open-source, commercial, pretrained or fine-tuned).
- Target a specific vertical or use case (see categories below).
- Where possible and permitted, submit code-switched audio samples used for testing, with basic metadata (language pair, domain, accent/country, device type, noise conditions).
For more information, visit Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge.
