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Mwalimu.ai

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AI tutor for Kenyan students

Voice-first AI tutor for primary-school students, aligned to the KICD curriculum. Bilingual English and Kiswahili, with mastery-based progression and parent-friendly dashboards. Built and maintained by VE.KE for Mwalimu.ai.

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The story

Mwalimu.ai is our in-house AI tutor for Kenyan primary-school children, Grade 1 to 6, mapped to the official KICD Competency-Based Curriculum. The product started from a simple observation: every available AI tutor on the market spoke English in American accents and treated Kiswahili as a translation rather than a teaching medium.

We fine-tuned an ASR specifically on East African child speech (baseline 40%+ WER → under 15%), built a code-switching pipeline that handles mid-sentence English ↔ Kiswahili (because that's how Kenyan kids actually talk), and tuned the Swahili TTS voices with SSML for instructional pacing. The platform layers mastery-based progression on top, with multi-child household accounts for parents and school licensing for institutional deployments.

What we built

Concrete features that are in production today. No roadmap items.

Voice-first tutoring

Real-time voice conversations via the OpenAI Realtime API, with low-latency ASR + TTS and code-switching detection.

Fine-tuned ASR

Custom model on East African child speech. Generic ASR hit 40%+ WER on student utterances; this clears under 15%.

SSML-tuned voices

Azure Swahili voices (Zuri, Asilia) tuned with lower pitch, slower pacing, and noun-prefix emphasis pauses.

Mastery progression

Curriculum decomposed into granular micro-skills. Diagnostic tests find gaps; spaced repetition closes them.

Multi-child households

Parents register multiple children. Each kid logs in with a 4-6 digit PIN and tracks their own progress.

School licensing

School-tier subscriptions with per-tenant daily-usage quota enforcement and admin oversight.

What stands out

Voice tutoring via the OpenAI Realtime API with code-switched Swahili / English
Fine-tuned ASR for Kenyan child speech, under 15% word error rate
School licensing with daily-usage quotas and 21 progress-tracking models

Want something like this?

Tell us what you need. Fixed price in KES within 2 working days.