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Troubleshooting & Limits
The things Twiga will tell you it cannot do, and the one thing it does instead of saying no. The second half is the part that can put wrong content in front of your class.
Most of Twiga’s limits cost you one message. You send it, you get one flat line back, and you know for next time. Those are on the first half of this page.
Then there is the limit that does not announce itself. Ask about a subject Twiga does not cover and it answers anyway, at length and with confidence. That is the second half, and it is the reason this page exists.
If you want the current list from Twiga itself, send this:
which subjects and forms do you support right now?Twiga reads typed text and nothing else. Send a voice note, a photo of your scheme of work, a pupil’s exercise book or a scan of an exam paper. They all come back with the same line.
Can you tell the contents from this message? [photo of a scheme of work]
Sorry, I only understand textual messages.
Never put your question in a caption
In that exchange the teacher typed his question as the caption on the photo. The caption was thrown away with the picture, even though it was plain readable English. If you want to attach something, send your question first, as its own message.There is one more trap here. A voice note or photo Twiga has not read yet can pull that refusal out much later. The “only textual messages” line then looks like an answer to the wrong question. Check what you sent before it.
Twiga can send you a NECTA-style exam paper and its solution key as two PDF files. That is the only thing it sends as a file.
Everything else arrives as chat text: lesson plans, notes, worksheets, exercises, anything you asked to be “printable”. Asking for a PDF of those does not work, whatever reason Twiga gives you for it. Copy the text into a document on your phone and print from there.
Twiga is built for secondary school teachers. Ask it for primary school material and it says plainly that it does not have any. If a colleague sent you this guide and you teach primary, that is the answer.
The subject list it gives you is short: Mathematics, Physics and Book Keeping, for Form 1 and Form 2. That list does not settle the question. Read the limit that does not say no, further down this page.
Inside one conversation, Twiga follows what you said. Ask it what your last question was and it answers correctly, and often the one before that too.
Your older chats are a different matter. Asked to remember the first question the teacher ever sent it, Twiga errored out. Treat it as having no memory of past months.
The practical consequence: anything you want in October, save in August. Star the message in WhatsApp, or paste it into a document. You cannot ask Twiga to find it again.
Ask Twiga your name or your school and it declines. It calls this privacy. It works from the profile you filled in, not from anything it can look up.
It may still greet you by a name you never typed in the chat. That name comes from the Personal Info form in your settings. If it is wrong, see Fixing Your Profile.
Ask it to make tea, or to talk about new phone prices, and it turns you down with a joke. It gives you a moment of chat, then steers back to teaching. It holds that line politely. It is a work tool, and it behaves like one.
Now the important part. Twiga declined English Literature in May, in clear terms. In July it produced a full Form 1 English topic list, tidy and confident, and offered to build lesson plans on it.
ok typing it out then. do you also help with english literature? i cover that on tuesdays
Right now, I support Mathematics, Physics, and Book Keeping for Form 1 and Form 2, so unfortunately, I can't assist with English Literature just yet. But hey, if you're teaching Maths, Physics, or Book Keeping, I've got your back with: - Clear explanations (straight from the TIE textbook) - Practice questions (NECTA-style)
in form one english, what topics are there?
Hi! 👋 I can help with Form 1 English topics. Here are the main topics typically covered in the Form 1 English curriculum: 1. Listening and Speaking - Listening to short stories, dialogues and announcements - Pronunciation and word stress 2. Reading - Reading comprehension (passages, stories, poems) - Skimming and scanning Would you like me to create practice questions, or a lesson plan for a specific topic?
Look at the two replies together. The first one says its explanations come straight from the TIE textbook. The second one names no book, no syllabus and no page. It is the same subject it had just turned down.
The same thing happened with Biology. Twiga produced a whole Form 1 Biology breakdown, term by term, with topics, subtopics, how many periods each takes and teaching notes. It opened with kulingana na silabasi ya TIE, meaning “according to the TIE syllabus”. Biology is not on its subject list, and the reply named no book and no page anywhere in it.
The sentence to remember
Asking outside the subjects Twiga covers does not get you a refusal. It gets you a confident answer that may be invented. The refusal is the safe outcome. The fluent answer is the dangerous one, because nothing in the way it is written tells you which one you are holding.Look at the bottom of the reply. An answer that came from a textbook carries a Sources: line naming your subject and your form. An invented one has nothing there.
Then the rule, in two lines:
Answers from outside its subjects are not useless. Teachers have used them. They are a first draft you rewrite, never material you take into a classroom as it is.