There are over 2,000 languages spoken across Africa. Most AI models know fewer than a dozen of them, and even those, poorly.
TemboAI was built to change that. But here's the truth: no team, no matter how talented, can teach an AI the full depth of 2,000+ languages. The proverbs your grandmother used. The slang your city invented last week. The way "no" means "yes" in certain contexts in Yoruba.
That knowledge lives with you. Today, we're giving you a way to share it.
What is the Community Data Cooperative?
Every time you chat with TemboAI, you can now click "Teach TemboAI" on any assistant message. A small panel opens right there, no popups, no redirects, where you can submit:
- Corrections: "That's not how you say it in Hausa"
- Translations: "Here's how to express this in Igbo"
- Proverbs & sayings: "We have a saying in Swahili for this…"
- Cultural context: "In Nigeria, this phrase actually means…"
- Slang & informal speech: "Nobody actually talks like that"
Each submission earns you +2 credits instantly. No waiting, no approval needed.
Quality Through Community
Your contributions go into a review queue where other users vote on them. This is how quality control works:
- Vote on others' contributions and earn +1 credit per vote
- When a contribution reaches +2 net upvotes, it's automatically validated
- The contributor earns a +5 credit bonus when their submission is validated
- Everything happens in real time. You'll see a notification the moment your contribution is validated
This isn't top-down moderation. It's community-driven quality assurance. The people who speak these languages decide what's accurate.
Contributor Titles
As your validated contributions grow, so does your title:
- 0–4: Seedling
- 5–19: Griot Apprentice
- 20–49: Village Scribe
- 50–99: Keeper of Words
- 100+: Elder of the Archive
The Griot, West Africa's oral historian, is the inspiration here. Griots have preserved culture through storytelling for centuries. The Community Data Cooperative continues that tradition, digitally.
Streaks and Milestones
Contribute every day and your streak grows. Hit a 7-day streak and earn +10 bonus credits. The streak resets if you miss a day, so consistency is rewarded.
The Leaderboard
Visit /leaderboard to see who's contributing the most. Filter by time period or language. See your rank among the community. It's not a competition. It's a celebration of the people making TemboAI smarter.
How Your Data Is Used
We call this a cooperative because we believe you deserve to know exactly what happens with your contributions. No fine print, no surprises.
The pipeline is simple:
- You submit a contribution. It enters the review queue.
- Other users vote on it. Their votes determine whether it's accurate.
- Once validated, your contribution enters our training dataset.
- Periodically, we use validated contributions to fine-tune TemboAI's language models. This is how TemboAI gets better at understanding and responding in African languages.
What others can see:
- Contributions in the review queue are visible to other logged-in users so they can vote. Your name is not attached to them in the review queue. Voters see the content, the language, and the type. That's it.
- The leaderboard shows your first name and last initial (e.g. "Kelvin D."), never your full name or email.
Your rights:
- You can view all your contributions at
/contributions?mine=true - Your contributions remain associated with your account
- We will never sell your contributions to third parties. They exist for one purpose: making TemboAI better at African languages
- If you delete your account, your contributions are anonymized. They remain in the training dataset (because the model has already learned from them) but are no longer tied to you
What we will never do:
- Use your private chat messages as training data without your explicit action. The only data that enters the training pipeline is what you deliberately submit through "Teach TemboAI"
- Share individual contributions with third parties
- Use contributions for anything other than improving TemboAI's language capabilities
This is the deal. You teach TemboAI. TemboAI gets smarter. You earn credits. Everyone who speaks your language benefits. No hidden agendas.
Why This Matters
Most AI training data comes from English-language internet content. African languages are chronically underrepresented. The few datasets that exist are often academic, formal, sterile, disconnected from how people actually speak.
The Community Data Cooperative flips this model. Instead of scraping the internet for imperfect data, we're asking the experts, you, to teach TemboAI directly. Every correction, every proverb, every piece of cultural context becomes training data that makes TemboAI better for everyone.
This is Phase 2 of our fine-tuning roadmap. Phase 1 was collecting interaction data. Phase 2 is this: structured, incentivized, community-driven data collection. Phase 3 will be using this data to fine-tune TemboAI's understanding of African languages.
Get Started
- Open any chat with TemboAI
- Hover over an assistant message
- Click the pen icon, "Teach TemboAI"
- Submit your knowledge
- Earn credits
Visit /contributions to see your submissions and review others'. Visit /leaderboard to see the community's top contributors.
Every contribution makes TemboAI a little smarter. Every vote makes the data a little more reliable. Together, we're building the training dataset that no company could build alone.
The Community Data Cooperative is live now for all TemboAI users. Log in and start teaching.