FoondaMate—or “study buddy” in Zulu—is a fast-growing, always-on, and highly relatable study aid for middle and high school students in emerging markets that’s built with Meta Llama. Students can ask their AI-enabled study buddy questions on WhatsApp and Messenger and receive conversational replies that help them with their schoolwork.

FoondaMate’s founding was inspired by Magagula’s experience as a young learner in under-resourced schools, where he often didn’t have access to textbooks. He used the internet to download study papers and notes to advance his education, earning him high marks and a top spot at one of Africa’s most prestigious universities. Now, other students can replicate Magagula’s journey by adding FoondaMate as a friend on WhatsApp and Messenger.

Since launching in 2020, FoondaMate has accumulated vast insight into how teenagers in emerging markets chat, learn, and engage. Its largest markets are South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria. To date, students have asked more than 100 million questions. Boyle says FoondaMate’s impact includes meaningful improvements in students’ grades—with a 30% uplift in university eligibility among students in South Africa who use FoondaMate, compared to their peers who don’t. “As an open-source tool, Llama is the perfect model for training on tone and deploying at scale to resource-constrained students who might struggle to pay more than $2 a month for a study tool,” Boyle says.

A conversation that flows naturally and mimics a teen’s way of texting with friends is core to delivering FoondaMate’s educational materials in an accessible and engaging way. This is especially helpful in Africa, where people often speak multiple languages in one conversation. Additionally, because most of FoondaMate’s users are teenagers, they tend to use slang specific to their age group, sprinkle their texts with lots of emojis, and phrase things in ways that might initially seem counterintuitive.

Boyle and Magagula say that they introduced Llama into FoondaMate incrementally—first deploying it in limited contexts, and then gradually expanding its use as their training set grew.

With Llama as a core component of Foondamate, the founders say they appreciate being part of a global open-source community where additional tools and learnings are shared.

“We’re especially excited by the strong focus on trust and safety with regards to human interaction,” Boyle says. “We certainly see ourselves using an increasing number of the safeguard mechanisms and tools being created by the Llama community.”

The team started with a small training set to infuse personality into conversations with FoondaMate, using Llama for non-educational conversations—for example, where users ask “How are you?” or “How was your day?” This allowed them to use generative AI in interactions without any risk to the educational context.

Over time, the team expanded its use in a conversational context, layering Llama 2 on top of FoondaMate’s own education knowledge base and models. With Llama 2 now fine tuned on the tone and personality of the FoondaMate bot, it can rephrase output from FoondaMate’s knowledge base and custom models—even using emojis in the proper context.

For many of the students who message with FoondaMate, this is likely the first time they’ve ever interacted with technology that feels as though it has been built specifically for them. Boyle adds that the majority of students who use FoondaMate do not have access to computers at home, and some don’t have computers at school. As a result, messaging FoondaMate is usually one of their first encounters with technology outside of interacting with friends on social media and messaging applications. The FoondaMate team wanted to make sure the onboarding process felt as smooth and natural as possible.

“We fine-tuned Llama with the goal of keeping our users engaged and feeling as though they are speaking to their smartest friend and not a robotic computer system,” Boyle says.

That approach is paying off, with students responding exactly as the FoondaMate creators had hoped.

“We see their questions shift from ‘How old are you?’ and ‘Where did you go to school?’ to questions about how robots learn and how to make their own robot like FoondaMate,” Boyle says. “It’s been incredibly rewarding to see them getting excited about technology and what’s happening under the hood. Our dream when starting FoondaMate was to help anyone from anywhere get access to a great education and get excited about learning. It’s amazing to see that start to happen.”