Taina

Taina is an AI assistant that lives in Telegram. You send her a photo, a voice note or a message about something you found. She asks what you already know about it, suggests what species it might be, and checks whether that sounds right to you. If you want, she saves it as an observation with its local name and any story you want to keep with it, and publishes it to your community's record when you say yes.

She started in 2023 as a prototype called ChatNaturally, built for the XPRIZE Rainforest semi-finals in Singapore. In Manaus the next version was called Dora, after Dora the Explorer. The communities who tested it suggested a better name: Taina. Marina Mura later wrote that her village ended up "falling in love with" the project, which they renamed "Taina, the guardian of the forest."

Her design came out of early mistakes. On the team's first visits to the Amazon, they found that forms, and even simple labels like "plants" and "animals", did not fit how groups like the Kayapó organise what they know. Much of that knowledge passes from person to person by speaking. So Taina is built for conversation. She asks follow-up questions and invites stories, and she accepts voice notes, photos and text in several languages.

In 2026 we brought a new version to Parque das Tribos. Each community now runs its own Taina on a Raspberry Pi, and a local champion decides who can use it. At the end of the workshop people wrote what they thought on a big sheet of paper. They liked that she helped them identify species and taught them about plants and animals. They did not like that she failed to understand voice messages in their local dialects, repeated symbols too often and never changed her tone. Under the things they liked, without anyone prompting them, someone wrote: "We can correct it when it's wrong."

Later that week, at Arte & Escola na Floresta, we tried something new. We showed the group two versions of Taina we had made on purpose. One told bad dad jokes. The other was melancholic and sighed about the state of the forest. Once everyone had laughed, the group got serious and redesigned her from scratch. They wanted her happy, curious, sincere, friendly, focused, and provocative enough to make you think. They did not want long messages, a formal tone, or answers that feel like filling in a form. Then they spent half an hour arguing about whether she should be allowed to make bad jokes.

Some things they could not fix in an afternoon. Speech recognition still does not serve most Indigenous and regional ways of speaking. That is a limit of today's AI models, and it shows who those models were built for. The team also went home with practical work: a way around Telegram's SMS fee, and a way to edit observations after they are uploaded.

What makes Taina worth studying is that her rules are in the open. Her personality lives in a plain text file that each community can read and change. She runs on hardware the community holds, as in lesson 07. Her data council decides what she publishes, as in lesson 08. And people who use her think of themselves as people who can correct her. That last part did not come from the code.