Two structural barriers have long limited the effectiveness of global AI voice platforms in South Africa: lack of local accent authenticity and latency caused by routing calls through overseas data centers.
Cape Town-based Untapped AI says it has addressed both challenges by building a voice automation platform specifically for South African conditions, rather than adapting foreign software designed for U.S. and European markets.
Most global AI voice systems are trained primarily on American and European datasets. When deployed locally, this often results in mispronounced South African names and towns, unnatural cadence and limited fluency across the country’s 11 official languages.
In voice automation, trust plays a decisive role in adoption. Industry observers note that if a voice sounds foreign or robotic, users disengage quickly.
“Authenticity should not be a feature. It is the foundation,” said Lloyd Matthew, founder and chief executive of Untapped AI. “We recorded five South African AI voice agents in our studio. That allowed us to achieve contextual understanding so conversations feel natural and locally fluent.”
Latency has been the second major constraint. Many international AI voice providers process calls through data centers outside Africa, meaning each local interaction must travel thousands of kilometers before a response is returned.
“If the infrastructure is not local, the experience will never be local,” Matthew said.
To address this, Untapped AI partnered with former telecommunications executives to build carrier-grade voice infrastructure designed for national scale. All AI systems are hosted in South African data centers, with support from Nvidia, enabling local-only routing and response times measured in milliseconds.
The company offers two deployment models, one targeting small and medium-sized enterprises and another designed for large corporates. Pricing and support are provided locally, with services billed in rand.
“There are two models because growing businesses and large enterprises have different needs,” Matthew said. “Both should be able to deploy automation without compromise.”
Matthew said the shift toward AI-driven customer interaction is unavoidable, pointing to recent disruption in the retail sector as an example of how companies that fail to modernize risk falling behind.
As AI automation becomes a baseline expectation rather than a competitive advantage, Untapped AI positions its locally built platform as evidence that South Africa can deploy globally competitive AI infrastructure without sacrificing linguistic authenticity or performance.
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