Imani — User Guide
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Imani — User Guide
← Back to the app
A complete walkthrough of every studio, setting, and feature — how to create, share, earn a place on the leaderboard, and keep your private moments private.
Imani turns what you want to say into narrated audio — in English, Swahili, French, or a natural English/Swahili mix — without you needing to record a single word yourself (unless you want to).
There's no password to remember. Sign in with your phone number or email, and Imani sends you a 6-digit code. Enter it, and you're in. Every new account starts with a small free batch of credits so you can try a piece right away.
A studio is just the kind of piece you're making. Each one is tuned for what it's actually for — the tone, the structure, and even how carefully it's reviewed before anyone else can hear it.
A short, punchy talk — hook, tension, turn, and something to hold onto today. Pick a tone: powerful, emotional, calm, tough love, or storytelling.
A character faces something real, makes a real choice, and the story earns its lesson instead of stating it. Can join a Series (see below) for recurring characters.
Age-banded children's stories (3–5, 6–8, 9–12), with a bedtime mode for a calmer, slower ending. Every single Watoto piece is checked by a real person before it can reach the public kids' feed — no exceptions.
AI-assisted sermon preparation — never "AI pastor." You choose a verse, chapter, or topic and a doctrine tradition, and every sermon needs your own explicit "Review & Approve" before it can be published, with a citation for every claim so you can check its reasoning line by line.
Tell Imani what's weighing on you and get something personal back, just for you. Moyo pieces can never be published or shared — see the Moyo section for exactly how your privacy is protected.
Next to the "what do you want to say" box, the 🎤 button lets you speak your idea instead of typing it. Tap it, say what you want, tap it again to stop — Imani transcribes it straight into the text box, exactly like typing would, so if a word comes out wrong you can just edit it like a typo. It never submits anything by itself.
This is free — describing what you want doesn't cost a credit. Generating and rendering the piece is the part that does.
Once a script is ready, you have three things you can do with it:
Swahili and mixed English/Swahili narration is voiced by Google's text-to-speech; English narration uses ElevenLabs. This is decided automatically per piece — you don't need to choose.
Anything for children, and anything doctrinal, gets a mandatory human check before it can reach anyone else — this is enforced by Imani itself, not just a suggestion. A Sermon piece specifically needs your own "Review & Approve" tap before Publish even becomes available, and redrafting a sermon resets that approval, since the new text hasn't been read yet. Watoto and Sermon pieces submitted to the public feed also go to a human reviewer before anyone else can see them there.
Once your audio is rendered, Publish gives the piece an unlisted link — anyone with the link can play it instantly in their browser, no account or app install required.
Tap Share to send it straight into WhatsApp, Facebook, or whatever your phone offers, using its native share sheet. If your browser doesn't support that, Imani falls back to direct WhatsApp/Facebook links and a copy-link button.
Publishing gives you a private link. Submitting to the feed (a separate button, once published) puts it in front of everyone browsing Discover. Motivation, Story, and Moyo-adjacent pieces go through a quick automated check and usually appear right away; Watoto and Sermon always wait for a human first.
Discover has three shelves:
For Watoto and Story, a Series lets you build a world once — a title, a setting, and a cast of characters with real personalities — and reuse it every time. Create one from the 📚 icon: give it a name, a short world description, and add characters with a name and a one-line persona.
When you attach a new creation to that series, Imani hands the model the whole cast and world, plus a reminder of your last few episode titles, so a returning character sounds like themselves and the story doesn't contradict what's already been established — while each episode still stands on its own for a listener hearing it for the first time.
From time to time, Imani runs a themed challenge — a prompt to write toward, open for a set window of days. Find active challenges under the 🏆 tab in Discover, and attach your creation to one from the challenge picker on the Create screen (for any studio except Moyo, which never publishes). The theme genuinely shapes what gets written — it's not just a label stuck on afterward.
Every challenge has its own leaderboard, ranked the same honest way as Trending — real completions and saves, not raw plays. There's also a global Top Creators board (this week, or all-time) under the same tab.
Drafting a script costs a small, fixed number of credits; rendering the full audio costs more, scaled to the length of the piece. Your balance is always shown at the top of the screen — tap it any time to top up.
Top-ups are paid with M-Pesa: pick a package, enter the phone number to pay from, and confirm the prompt that appears on your phone. Credits land automatically once the payment clears — you don't need to do anything else or refresh.
From Settings, Manage voice clones lets you create an AI clone of your own voice. This is handled carefully, on purpose:
Settings (⚙️) holds three things that shape every piece you make:
Moyo is built around one promise: what you tell it stays yours.
Imani is a Progressive Web App — it installs straight from your browser, no app store needed. On most Android phones, open Imani in Chrome and look for "Add to Home screen" in the browser menu. On iPhone, open it in Safari, tap the Share icon, then "Add to Home Screen." Once installed, it opens full-screen like any other app and keeps its shell available even on a patchy connection.