I built Afrilingua because nobody was building the personal AI I wanted to live with.
What's on the market is a thousand chatboxes — one for code, one for email, one for image generation, one for the social feed — none of which remember you for more than an hour. The "AI revolution" so far has mostly meant: here is one more app, please open it.
Afrilingua puts one assistant — Aura — on every device you use, with one memory. The Aura on your phone is the same Aura on your laptop, in your browser, inside your code editor, at your front door. It knows your calendar, your inbox, your repo, your music, your home, your money. When you ask it for something, it doesn't start from zero — it starts from you.
The wake-word is Padi. West African Pidgin for friend. Because that is what this is supposed to be. Not an oracle. Not a productivity tool. A friend who knows where you've been and what you're trying to do.
The other half of Afrilingua is Gist — a social network built on the AT Protocol, the same open protocol that powers Bluesky. Your handle is @you.afrilingua.ai. Your posts, your follows, your DMs — they are records, not entries in our database. You can take them with you. You can move them. You can leave.
That is the trust position, and it has to be. Because the only social network worth living on is one that doesn't own you.
Afrilingua is African-founded. That is not a market — it is a design constraint, and it makes the product better for everyone.
It means translation across African languages is first-class, not a checkbox. It means payments through Flutterwave sit beside Plaid as equals, not as an afterthought. It means the voice you hear in your headphones doesn't sound like a Californian therapist; it sounds like Padi — a friend who would meet you for jollof.
The world has been shipped one cultural defaults setting for software for thirty years. We are shipping another one.
Aura runs against Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT, or Google's Gemini — using your API keys, on whichever model family you trust most. The bet here is structural: the user, not the platform, gets to choose which intelligence runs against their data.
Aura will never write, send, post, or pay for you without asking first. Every write goes through a confirmation gate. Every time.
Your data will never be sold, never shared with advertisers, never used to train a foundation model without you saying yes — separately, explicitly, and undoable.
Your social handle is yours. If you leave, you leave with it.
If we ever break one — tell me.