South Africa’s Botlhale AI Empowers Businesses to Engage Customers in African Languages
Only 8% of South Africans speak English at home, and just 30% feel fully comfortable expressing themselves in English. For millions, this language gap creates daily barriers to accessing digital services and customer support. Botlhale AI, a pioneering South African startup, is changing this reality by helping businesses communicate with their customers in the languages they know and trust.
Co-founder Thapelo Nthite shared the inspiration behind Botlhale AI in a video posted by SA Innovation. Reflecting on a moment when his grandmother couldn’t load prepaid airtime because the instructions were only in English, then he realized how language can isolate millions from digital services. “A conversation might start off in English, switch to isiZulu, go back to English, then include some Afrikaans,” he explained. “Existing models aren’t built for such an environment but that’s where we come in.”
Botlhale AI builds natural language processing tools designed specifically for African languages. The company supports 13 languages so far and plans to expand to over 20 languages spoken by more than 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa within the next 24 months. Their tools help businesses transcribe and analyze multilingual customer calls, build virtual assistants that communicate in local languages on platforms like WhatsApp, and offer APIs so other innovators can integrate these language tools into their own solutions. Unlike many competitors who use one-size-fits-all models, Botlhale AI focuses on low-resource languages and low-resolution environments, tailoring each model to fit customers’ real-world needs.
Their offerings include: Call centre analytics: Transcribes and analyses multilingual calls to help businesses extract actionable insights, regardless of which language is spoken.
Conversational AI platform: Lets businesses build multilingual virtual assistants that work on WhatsApp and other channels, using both speech and text.
APIs: Allows developers and other innovators to integrate Botlhale AI’s language tools into their own applications.
Unlike generic models used by global competitors, Botlhale AI’s solutions are tailored to the unique challenges of “low-resource” languages and environments like call centres. “We’re not building models for the sake of it,” he noted. “We’re building them for our customers to use.”
The startup is currently selling to South Africa’s $300 million customer experience technology market and is raising $2 million to scale further and strengthen its position as a leader in African B2B CX tech. Thapelo Nthite emphasized that beyond technology, the mission is to create meaningful engagement between businesses and the “other 92%” of customers who don’t speak English at home. “When you remove the language barrier, you unlock digital access,” he said. Botlhale AI shows how African businesses can become more inclusive by literally speaking the language of their customers.
As African businesses aim to build more inclusive platforms, Botlhale AI’s mission highlights a powerful truth: speaking to customers in their own language isn’t just good technology, it’s good business.
