Help AI Understand Yoruba
Published
Yoruba (Èdè Yorùbá) is spoken across West Africa (southwestern Nigeria, Benin, Togo) and the global Yoruba diaspora, 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 Yoruba. You earn TEND Points, not money.
Why AI struggles with Yoruba
Yoruba is tonal and its diacritics carry meaning, which most models drop, so answers lose both tone and politeness. Training data skews to a few high-resource languages, evaluation sets rarely cover Yoruba, and local meaning gets lost. Human judgments from Yoruba 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 Yoruba. Tap to Train.
What understanding Yoruba looks like
Consider a request like: "Write a respectful message to an elder for a naming ceremony, using the right honorifics." 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 Yoruba. More at tendril.foundation, or see the Yoruba dataset page for buyers.
Yoruba FAQ
- Do I need to speak Yoruba to help?
- It helps most if you do. Tap to Train judgments from fluent Yoruba 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.
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