Smart algorithms have taken Google a long way. They helped the company dominate search and create the first software to conquer the complex board game Go. Now the company is betting that algorithms that understand images and text will draw business to its cloud services, make augmented reality popular, and prompt us to search using our smartphone cameras. But some of the algorithms Google is staking its future on aren’t equally smart everywhere.

The search company’s machine learning systems work best on material from a few rich parts of the world, like the US. They stumble more frequently on data from less affluent countries—particularly emerging economies like India that Google is counting on to maintain its growth.

“We have a very sparse training data set from parts of the world that are not the United States and Western Europe,” says Anurag Batra, a product manager at Google. When Batra travels to his native Delhi, he says Google’s AI systems become less smart. Now, he leads a project trying to change that. “We can understand pasta very well, but if you ask about pesarattu dosa, or anything from Korea or Vietnam, we’re not very good,” Batra says.

To fix the problem, Batra is tapping the brains and phones of some of Google’s billions of users. His team built an app called Crowdsource that asks people to perform quick tasks like checking the accuracy of Google’s image-recognition and translation algorithms. Starting this week, the Crowdsource app also asks users to take and upload photos of nearby objects.

Google wants your help teaching its image recognition algorithms. Google

Batra says that could help improve Google’s image search, camera apps, or its Lens application that offers augmented-reality features and information on monuments and other objects.

Google, like other tech companies active in machine learning, pays contractors to label images collected online. But internet images are heavily skewed towards the Western and affluent. “Things like what does a sewing machine look like in your world or what does a pair of slippers look like in your world can really help us,” Batra says. Google will also ask users if they will allow their images to be released in an open-source collection intended to aid AI research, and allow people to review and delete their contributions later.

Google has a Bangalore-based team that promotes the Crowdsource app in India and other parts of Asia at colleges and to community groups. This year it will expand elsewhere, with Latin America probably next in line. Batra says the program could be important to Google’s ambitions in augmented reality. The company’s software can handily recognize the Taj Mahal, but not all of the other historic monuments nearby, he says.

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Using the Crowdsource app shows the breadth of Google’s interest in understanding the world and people’s lives in it. WIRED was invited to verify labels applied to photos in over 80 categories, ranging from toddlers to brides to funerals. The app also wanted help transcribing handwriting scrawled on touchscreens, and recognizing whether sentences from online reviews raving about cauliflower or ranting about builders expressed positive, negative, or neutral emotions.

Some tasks presented by the app demonstrate why Google needs more training data. Images of nuns and the Virgin Mary were tagged as brides, for example, and a photo from a moon landing as a snowscape.

On Reddit, one Crowdsource contributor documented the app displaying a drawing of a woman’s genitals and asking “Does this picture contain ‘kiss’?” Batra says Google tries to screen out offensive content before showing images in the app, and notes that users can report any that slip through.

Amazon also crowdsources images to train its AI systems—but will pay you a few cents for each photo. Amazon

Data gathered via Crowdsource could prove valuable if it can help Google’s systems work equally well in Mumbai as Mountain View. With Western markets saturating, Google needs newer ones like India to sustain its growth. Any time an algorithm misunderstands something, it could be leaving rupees on the table.