AI’s last mile

When AI Calls You, Trust Must Be Earned 

An old Hausa proverb holds that ‘gani ya kori ji’: seeing chases away hearing. For most of history, the ear came second to the eye. Artificial intelligence may soon have these human  senses at parity. Very soon, a farmer in Gombe will describe his yellowing maize to a phone, in Hausa, and hear a useful answer in Hausa within seconds. He will not join a queue or wait a whole season for an agriculture extension worker who may never come. For hundreds of millions of Nigerians who speak more easily than they read, the voice may become the most powerful public service humanity has ever built. 

The need is urgent. Daily Trust newspaper reported last year that Nigeria has an estimated one extension worker for every 6,466 farm families, far below the one-to 800 ratio recommended by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. The experts behind that finding called for digital extension platforms and farm radio to close the gap. 

Radio has served Nigeria well, and I respect it. But radio talks. It does not listen. It speaks at seven o’clock to millions, and it cannot answer the one farmer whose problem started this morning, except by telephone – a different medium. The government office queue and the call centre’s endless hold music fail in the same way. They serve the system’s schedule, not the citizen’s needs. 

Voice AI in local languages is radio that answers back, and it is no longer theory. In India, the Jugalbandi assistant takes information on government programmes, which is usually written in English, and gives it back to citizens in their own language. Citizens no longer have to stand in line at a service centre just to get basic information. India’s government adopted it into its national language platform, Bhashini. 

Nigeria has its own proof. Helium Health deployed HeliumDoc, a voice AI tool that lets young people check their risk of HIV, tuberculosis and diabetes, privately and on their own terms. 

Nigerians aged 15 to 35 carry a heavy burden of disease, yet fear of stigma, money troubles and distrust of the system keep many from seeking care in time. HeliumDoc sorts users by risk, gives instant feedback, and refers them to nearby clinics. A young person can call in and be assessed simply by speaking. This risk stratification is preventive care, sorting people so that scarce doctors reach the most urgent cases first. Imagine similar assessments in Urhobo for a young man in Warri, or in Hausa for a young woman in Kano. 

The promise is real. But there is a catch. The same machine that can speak to the farmer can also be misused to speak as his son. 

In 2019, the chief executive of a British energy firm took a call from his boss in Germany. He heard his boss’s familiar slight German accent and voice patterns, and he suspected nothing. 

He sent about $243,000 to a “supplier” in Hungary. His boss never called. A machine did. A 2023 survey by the security firm McAfee found that one executive in ten had been targeted by an AI voice-cloning scam, and that 77 per cent of those targets lost money. 

Let me bring it home. It is midnight in Kaduna. A mother’s phone rings. Her son is crying. He has had an accident, and he needs money now. The voice is his. The fear is hers. By morning, the money is gone. 

That midnight call must not kill the morning promise. Igbo elders teach that onye ajụjụ anaghị efu ụzọ: the one who asks questions does not lose the way. Every voice system should make asking easy. It begins with honesty: no machine should pretend to be human, so every AI caller must announce itself. Proof should then match the stakes. A question about clinic hours needs no checks, but a request for money, a password or a one-time code must always be confirmed through a second channel. Families need their own defence too: a code word agreed at the dinner table, never on the phone. Builders must test these systems where Nigerians actually live, on noisy lines, in busy markets, and in speech that moves between English, Pidgin and Kanuri in one sentence. A system that fails there is not ready. And whatever the machine does, a human must always be one step away. 

There is a deeper danger. The legal scholars Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron call it the “liar’s dividend”. When fakes become common, a guilty person can dismiss a genuine recording as fake. So trust does not leak only from the victim. It drains the whole society. And the poorest pay the most, because they depend on the voice when they cannot comprehend the written word. 

Nigerians are an oral people. Our history, our medicine and our law travelled by voice for centuries. Voice AI in Hausa, Yoruba, Itsekiri, Igala, and hundreds of other Nigerian languages  could put a patient, knowledgeable elder in every pocket. If it is built with trust from the first day, the voice that answers back will also be a voice Nigerians can believe. 

Prompt of the Week: Build your family’s scam shield  

Here’s a plan your family can use tonight. Open any free AI assistant like ChatGPT, Qwen or 

Claude and paste this (remember to fill the bracket): 

“Help me create a simple plan to protect my family from voice-cloning scams. My  family speaks [your language] and English. Please do four things. First, explain in plain words, in both languages, how scammers can copy a loved one’s voice. 

Second, help us choose a family code word that is easy to remember but that no stranger could guess, and suggest rules for when to use it. Third, write a short script my elderly parents can follow if they receive an urgent call asking for money. 

Keep everything short enough to fit on one page we can print.” 

If the AI struggles with your language, note where it fails. That failure is evidence of why local- language AI should be built urgently. 

Print the result and discuss it at your next family meal.  

Dr Olayinka Iyinolakan is the CEO of Indigenius AI. He’s an academic and AI leader developing a human-centred account of how people learn, work and exercise judgment in a world where  super intelligence is within reach. 

He can be reached at [email protected]