Help AI Understand Swahili
Published
Swahili (Kiswahili) is spoken across East Africa (Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, DR Congo and the wider Great Lakes region), yet most AI models handle it poorly. Tendril lets anyone help change that: open a browser tab to contribute compute, or tap on your phone to judge which of two AI answers is better. Your input becomes open human-feedback data that can be used to build AI that understands Swahili. You earn TEND Points, not money.
Why AI struggles with Swahili
Tens of millions speak Kiswahili, yet most AI models miss its noun-class grammar and answer everyday local questions poorly. Training data skews to a few high-resource languages, evaluation sets rarely cover Swahili, and local meaning gets lost. Human judgments from Swahili speakers are exactly the signal that fixes this.
How you help
Open a Tab: open a tab and Tendril quietly runs AI work in the background using only your spare capacity. It steps aside the moment you need your machine. Open a Tab.
Tap to Train: on your phone, see two AI answers and tap the better one. It takes seconds. Each tap is a human-preference judgment that can help make AI better at Swahili. Tap to Train.
What understanding Swahili looks like
Consider a request like: "Explain how M-Pesa mobile money works to someone sending money to a relative upcountry." Today's models often stumble on prompts like this. Human judgments on answers to prompts like it are the open data Tendril helps create.
Open data, in the open
The data the network creates is a public good. The Tendril Foundation's mission is open AI for the languages and communities the market skips, including Swahili. More at tendril.foundation, or see the Swahili dataset page for buyers.
Swahili FAQ
- Do I need to speak Swahili to help?
- It helps most if you do. Tap to Train judgments from fluent Swahili speakers are the most valuable signal. But anyone can contribute compute by opening a tab.
- Is it free?
- Totally. Nothing to buy, no subscription. You lend a little of your device's spare power, or tap a few times on your phone, and you earn points for it.
- What do I get for it?
- You earn TEND Points for everything you contribute, and they actually mean something. Points are your rank, your reputation, and your proof that you helped build open AI. They are not money and we never promise payouts. A token is on the roadmap, and points are how the network recognizes the people who power it.
Other languages
Yoruba · Hausa · Amharic · Thai · Tagalog · Bahasa Indonesia