Workshop Challenge

The Challenge

Across Africa, people rarely speak in neat, single-language blocks. Conversations move naturally between English/French and languages like Swahili, Hausa, Zulu, Yoruba, Igbo, Pidgin, Amharic, or Kinyarwanda, often within the same sentence. This is code-switching, and it remains one of the most under-solved problems in voice AI: systems built for clean, monolingual speech tend to break down in the real, messy, multilingual settings where they're needed most.

The MLC (Africa) × Intron Agentic Voice AI Challenge invites participants at Deep Learning Indaba 2026 to build voice-driven agentic applications that work the way Africa actually speaks, using Intron's Sahara APIs as a foundation to help surface how well current speech models handle code-switched audio in real-world settings.

Build an agentic voice application

A solution where voice is used to drive a downstream task or action, not just transcribe speech. 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. Each submission must:

1. 1Use voice to achieve a downstream task (the agentic component), not simply convert speech to text.
2. 2Benchmark 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, or commercial).
3. 3Target a specific vertical or use case (see categories below).
4. 4Where permitted, submit the code-switched audio samples used for testing, with basic metadata (language pair, domain, accent/country, device type, noise conditions).

As a bonus tip, we are providing free adaptation labs credit to teams that may want to train/finetune their own models for benchmarking against Intron's Sahara model. Kindly fill the form below to request for this credit.

Suggested Categories

Teams are encouraged, but not required, to align their solution with one of the following:

• →Health
• →Fintech, Telco & Customer Experience
• →Legal & Public Services
• →Agriculture & Education
• →Other high-impact use cases (humanitarian response, accessibility, media, transport, commerce, civic engagement, etc.)

What to Submit

• Solution DescriptionA short description of the problem, target users, solution, and technical overview highlighting key design decisions.
• DemoA short demo video of a working prototype or integrated application — a link to an unlisted/public YouTube video.
• DocsCode or technical documentation (integrations into proprietary applications from startups or enterprises do not need to submit confidential code).
• Benchmark reportResults comparing at least three speech models (including Sahara), with pros and cons of using each.
• Ethics / InclusionA brief note on privacy, consent, safety, and responsible data use.
• Benchmark Audios (optional)Consented, de-identified code-switched audio samples used for benchmarking in your selected category, with metadata.

Key Dates

• 3rd August 2026Registration opens
• 6th August 2026Submission deadline
• 7th August 2026Finalists announced at the workshop (Main Plenary Hall)
• Same day / later onlineWinner(s) announced

Teams that want to continue building after Indaba can carry over their submission into Intron's full Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge (build period through mid-September, winners announced October 1).

Judging Criteria

• Real-world impactIs the solution agentic, and does it address a genuine user need for a meaningful population?
• Code-switching performanceQuality and fairness of the benchmark comparison across models.
• Product qualityUsability and workflow fit of the agentic application.
• Technical executionReliability, integration, latency, robustness.
• Ethics, safety & inclusionConsent, privacy, bias awareness, respect for user dignity.

Bonus consideration for: strong benchmark design, low-resource language coverage, offline/low-bandwidth readiness, and clear potential to continue into the full Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge.

Workshop Challenge Prize

Provided by Intron

• →Access to Sahara v2.5 code-switching APIs across supported language pairs.
• →Access to the AfriSwitch benchmark dataset with code-switching samples in 12 language pairs.
• →A public benchmarking framework for comparing model performance.