[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) - Personal AI language tutor
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Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) - Personal AI language tutor
Hey HN, we're Mariano and Anton from ISSEN (https://issen.com), a
foreign language voice tutor app that adapts to your interests,
goals, and needs. Demo:
https://www.loom.com/share/a78e713d46934857a2dc88aed1bb100d?... We
started this company after struggling to find great tools to
practice speaking Japanese and French. Having a tutor can be
awesome, but there are downsides: they can be expensive (since you
pay by the hour), difficult to schedule, and have a high upfront
cost (finding a tutor you like often forces you to cycle through a
few that you don't). We wanted something that would talk with us
-- realistically, in full conversations -- and actually help us
improve. So we built it ourselves. The app relies on a custom voice
AI pipeline combining STT (speech-to-text), TTS (text-to-speech),
LLMs, long term memory, interruptions, turn-taking, etc. Getting
speech-to-text to work well for learners was one of the hardest
parts -- especially with accents, multi-lingual sentences, and
noisy environments. We now combine Gemini Flash, Whisper, Scribe,
and GPT-4o-transcribe to minimize errors and keep the conversation
flowing. We didn't want to focus too much on gamification. In our
experience, that leads to users performing well in the app,
achieving long streaks and so on, without actually getting fluent
in the language you're wanting to learn. With ISSEN you instantly
speak and immerse yourself in the language, which, while not easy,
is a much more efficient way to learn. We combine this with a word
bank and SRS flashcards for new words learned in the AI voice
chats, which allows very rapid improvement in both vocabulary and
speaking skills. We also create custom curriculums for each student
based on goals, interests, and preferences, and fully customizable
settings like speed, turn taking, formality, etc. App:
https://issen.com (works on web, iOS, Android) Pricing: 20 min free
trial, $20-29/month (depending on duration and specific geography)
We'd love your feedback -- on the tech, the UX, or what you'd wish
from a tool like this. Thanks!
Author : mariano54
Score : 208 points
Date : 2025-06-26 14:32 UTC (8 hours ago)
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| >We didn't want to focus too much on gamification.
|
| Thank you so much for this. Duolingo is literally unbearable
| because it's so gamified. I'll try it out later. I've seen a few
| of these apps, can I seamlessly go between my native language and
| the language I'm trying to learn? If I am trying to learn Hindi,
| can I ask a question in English in the middle of a conversation?
| mariano54 wrote:
| Yes, we've spent a lot of time getting the STT and TTS to work
| seamlessly in multilingual, it works pretty well!
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| The app is optimized on the whole population, not on individual
| level. They even publish papers on global optimization.
|
| These kinds of learning apps are destined to become mediocre
| over time.
|
| The learning metric is so easy to capture, the learning content
| so easy to produce, yet no one has an individualized loop to
| make learning work well.
|
| For example, I'd press "Training" on Duolingo, and would get
| nowhere. Same lessons all of the time. Bread and water.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Duolingo is laughably inefficient. I have an app I've made
| for myself to learn french, and it's amazing how little
| effort is required to make something 10x better. (I completed
| the french Duolingo tree and learned essentially nothing so I
| feel justified in saying that.) If you're learning french,
| let me know and I'll add you to the app.
| jlarks32 wrote:
| Yeah great work with this. Seems like a real opportunity given
| how hard Duolingo is dropping the ball.
| xmodem wrote:
| This actually looks pretty neat. How have you been able to
| achieve such broad language support so quickly?
|
| How widely have you tested your supported languages on native-
| speakers and learners?
| mariano54 wrote:
| The STT and LLM support many languages out of the box. For TTS
| we use multiple providers based on their strengths and
| weaknesses (for example minimax is great for Chinese)
|
| We've done a lot of testing on Spanish, English, Italian,
| Japanese, and French, but much less on the others and none at
| all for some of the niche ones.
|
| The language support is based on the intersection of the
| languages that have low word errors rates in the transcribers,
| as well as officially supported by LLM/TTS (like gpt4.1, eleven
| labs etc).
|
| We've seen the models' quality improve consistently over the
| last 6 months, in all languages we tested, and now the error
| rates are getting really low.
| xmodem wrote:
| Right - I think it would be appreciated by your users if you
| at the very least made it clear from the outset how well
| different languages are supported and what degree of testing
| you have done.
|
| Certainly if your product were to mis-teach me important
| details, and I were to then find out that you had spent less
| time testing than I had spent learning, I would be quite
| angry.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I tried the Web Version. Started, then tried to create an
| account, but it kept looping, informing me that my email address
| does not exist in your system. Well, the "Create New Account" got
| kicked off and gets me in a loop of "Do not Exist". I just went
| through the whole process again, and I'm back to the beginning.
|
| I'm going to assume this works better on the App.
| antonaf wrote:
| Unclear what issue you hit, we'll look into it. Thanks for
| sharing.
| johncole wrote:
| I appreciate your comment about gamification. I've kept a streak
| alive on other apps for no other reason than keeping a streak
| alive. Not learning a thing.
| antonaf wrote:
| Yeah, this is the biggest gripe we hear about much of the
| existing language learning landscape. That they're effectively
| gaming apps masked as language learning apps.
| 55555 wrote:
| You should still gamify it. Gamification is orthogonal to
| whether the tool actually works and positively correlated
| with whether the user actually uses it.
| Velorivox wrote:
| I would argue that games are a great analogue to language
| learning as well. Contrary to our ideals, people do like to
| enjoy themselves and are more likely to pick an activity
| they enjoy than one they don't. Games and puzzles are able
| to present frustration as enjoyment (provided there is
| appropriate reward and perceived growth) making them great
| tools for learning.
|
| However, gamification can only do so much and I'm afraid
| language learning is a lot like learning to code: many
| people want to want it but few actually want it. In that
| case, presenting as a "want it" when you are a "want to
| want it" is social proof and largely unrelated to whether
| you are actually learning (as long as the pretense is kept
| up) -- hence the success of Duolingo despite the relatively
| poor real-world outcomes. In Duolingo's case the streaks
| are even explicitly considered to be social proof.
| guilhermesfc wrote:
| Looks great. I have been looking for something like this
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Luis von Ahn spoke in the early 2010s--probably around 2014--at
| The LAB in Wynwood, Miami. He recounted how his fascination with
| crowd-sourcing led first to reCAPTCHA and then to his latest
| venture, Duolingo. He made it clear that his real passion wasn't
| language per se, but building a crowd-sourced human translation
| service as a business model. At that point, Duolingo had roughly
| 24 employees--and, much to his surprise, only two were focused on
| the crowd-sourcing engine. He explained how they'd enlisted some
| of the world's leading language-education researchers as
| consultants. Their very first question: "Which part of speech
| should learners tackle first?" The experts confessed they didn't
| know, so the team gathered the data and used A/B testing coupled
| with statistical analysis to pinpoint the answer.
|
| Today, it's not only easier than ever to launch a platform to
| challenge Duolingo, but its core product--its crowd-sourced human
| translation service--has been distrupted.
|
| This morning, I found myself thinking about how all those decade-
| old learning platforms--like Coursera, as reflected in its ever-
| falling stock price--are being distrupted.
|
| Your product looks awesome and I hope you distrupt all the
| language learning platforms. Thank you for sharing.
|
| (I had ChatGPT fix my grammatical errors and now this comment
| doesn't sound like me, sorry.)
| b3orn wrote:
| > (I had ChatGPT fix my grammatical errors and now this comment
| doesn't sound like me, sorry.)
|
| And it didn't correct "distrupted" to disrupted?
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Nope
|
| https://imgur.com/a/m3svUky
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > https://imgur.com/a/m3svUky
|
| That's an image of text. Is it supposed to provide more
| evidentiary value than the word "Nope" above it would by
| itself?
|
| I'll bet you I can show you a screenshot where "ChatGPT"
| says whatever your heart desires.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Coursera is failing because its platforms are infested with Big
| tech cert slop.
|
| And mid 2010s view was MOOCs were supposed to disrupt
| University education!
|
| Add it to the pile.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| Do you store conversations? And what's the general privacy
| philosophy behind the app?
| mariano54 wrote:
| We store the messages, but not the audio. We also store session
| summaries and a "user facts" summary that gets regenerated
| after every session, based on all session summaries, everything
| in our AWS DB.
|
| You can delete your account at any time to fully wipe all your
| data, but there is no way to delete sessions ATM.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Those FAQ boxes on the main page don't expand?
| mariano54 wrote:
| What device and browser?
| zuminator wrote:
| Same for me, Google browser, Android.
| noleary wrote:
| I can't wait to try this! I studied a few languages in school and
| have lost any semblance of proficiency -- mainly because I never
| have a real occasion to use anything other than English. I've
| been waiting for someone to build something like this
| akshayKMR wrote:
| Why not use the Gemini flash voice-api directly instead? Cost? I
| ask because from the demo, the tutor's voice seems mechanical.
| I've played with the gemini voice api and it's quite impressive
| for conversation with low latency, I'd say perfect for your use
| case. It even switches languages if I say "Okay, let's talk in
| $foo language".
|
| The vocabulary tooling looks neat and well thought out.
| mariano54 wrote:
| Multiple reasons (which also apply to openAIs realtime API): -
| it's less intelligent than the non voice apis - intelligence
| degrades even further with lots of context - more expensive -
| latency is not a free lunch, it comes at the cost of more
| interruptions from the tutor, which is a really bad UX. We
| prefer to interrupt less and have higher latency
|
| Also, we prefer the eleven labs voices, but there is definitely
| varying quality. I'm guessing later this year or next, the
| voice to voice models will become good enough, and we will
| switch over.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| Can't wait to try it; my kids need to learn French in school and
| I've been trying to keep up with them with Duolingo; but
| something is missing there.
|
| For me a key feature will be a family plan; Duolingo is great in
| that regard.
| chrischen wrote:
| Speaking of translation with LLMs I've been looking for a
| solution to quickly open a bi-directional translation context
| without having to prompt ChatGPT or any other LLM every time. iOS
| lets you set the action button to use the default translation app
| quickly, but the translation it provides is vastly inferior to
| LLMs.
|
| Even some basic app that can pre-load the prompt doesn't seem to
| exist?
| anavat wrote:
| Thanks for working on this! Language learning really needs a
| breakthrough.
|
| Now, I tried the web app and chose to learn Greek as a beginner.
| And while I had better experience with your app than with ChatGPT
| or Gemini voice modes, I still got lost 5 minutes in because the
| AI tutor doesn't seem to have a plan for me, nor does it "see" my
| struggles. For example, after asking me about a hobby, it gives
| me a long sentence in Greek about how how it is nice to hike in
| mountains. Being absolute noob I cannot reply to it, nor even
| repeat it. And I don't even know what it is expected from me at
| the moment. A human tutor here would probably repeat a part of
| the sentence with a translation and ask me to repeat, or would
| explain something. The AI just sits there waiting for me to make
| a sound, and when I make it, it goes on on a tangental subject of
| beach vacations. :)
|
| Again, this is still relatively not bad, and I'm going to give it
| another try.
| drakonka wrote:
| I had a similar feeling with Swedish just now. It isn't really
| much different than conversing with ChatGPT in advanced voice
| mode - it's up to me to drive the conversation and it all feels
| quite arbitrary (and I find myself instinctively falling back
| on topics I know how to talk about, which quite defeats the
| purpose). I was hoping for a more structured learning plan that
| strategically expands my comfort zone and skills in a guided
| way.
| mariano54 wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. Yeah we need to improve the beginner
| experience, it's more tailored towards intermediate/advanced
| students at the moment.
| drakonka wrote:
| Do you mean that the experience is meant to have more
| structure if you pick the intermediate or advanced level?
| (fwiw I did pick intermediate for my Swedish level in the
| app).
|
| My thinking is - I can have unstructured conversations with
| Advanced Voice Mode or in real life here in Sweden. What
| I'd really appreciate is a guided learning experience
| taking me up from intermediate/slightly above intermediate
| to fluent in the most efficient possible way (as opposed to
| just having us 'ramble' about random topics of my own
| choosing).
| mariano54 wrote:
| There is a structured curriculum that gets generated
| after the intro lesson (if you responded yes to the
| curriculum question).
|
| This is available for all proficiencies. It's just much
| harder to talk for hours in a new language as a beginner.
| It's usable but requires more effort.
| Ocha wrote:
| So basically if you are starting a new language from zero,
| then this is not for you?
| mariano54 wrote:
| That's correct.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Why wouldn't intermediate/advanced students just talk
| directly to ChatGPT? From what I see, I thought your value
| prop was for the beginners.
| mariano54 wrote:
| ISSEN is designed from the ground up for this use case.
|
| * curriculum, completely customizable, with grammar,
| roleplay, topics, speaking speech, transcript,
| dictionary, corrections, etc
|
| * prompting and AI models all chosen to be a better fit
| for multilingual, easy to understand, etc.
|
| * the tutor actively tries to teach you, it's not an
| assistant
|
| * integrated flashcards that go hand in hand with the
| speaking immersion
| 55555 wrote:
| I'm an advanced learner but I stopped after a few moments
| because it's boring. It's asking me questions that you'd
| ask a beginner (although a beginner wouldn't understand the
| questions). It just asked what food I like to eat, where I
| like to travel, whether I like the weather, etc. I have a
| language tutor IRL and I have found that we run out of
| things to talk about too. So we often find ourselves just
| discussing the latest events from the news. I think you
| should feed fresh conversation topics daily from a data
| source like the news, localized to the user. There are
| global news APIs you can subscribe to.
| cameldrv wrote:
| As an intermediate German speaker I thought it was great!
| kevmo314 wrote:
| I think this is a pretty big limitation of the architecture
| (STT->LLM->TTS) they've chosen. The intonation around
| struggling to speak or difficulty with certain phrases is
| totally lost when the text is transcribed.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I think the point here is for you to _practice_ (i.e. develop
| "muscle memory" for speaking), not to _learn_.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| As far as using language goes, those aren't different things.
| mattbee wrote:
| I paid for Memrise to polish up French. The scripted lessons
| alwere great but it dropped me into an AI conversation
| assistant that did exactly the same. It forgot the vocab and
| grammar level that the scripted lessons had taught, and often
| broke into idiom. I haven't picked it up since.
| Nadya wrote:
| I'm a Memrise beta member w/ lifetime premium access for my
| contributions to the site in its early days. I cannot
| recommend anyone use Memrise for anything nowadays it has
| been so heavily enshittified. In fact, I recommend against
| using it in favor of Anki (Memrise's biggest strength over
| Anki in the early days was the community mnemonics and
| courses (Anki equivalent "community decks") - none of which
| really exist in any way today).
|
| I tried following the modern Japanese track on Memrise and
| was appalled at how bad it is nowadays.
| sirodoht wrote:
| Funnily enough I said my native language is Greek but then it
| responded with an error and reset my onboarding guide. Then, I
| lied that my native language is English, which worked. But now
| it calls me Anton, rather than the name I said I have!
| dbuxton wrote:
| I also got Anton. Looks like something's hard coded - or
| maybe a caching issue?
| mtalantikite wrote:
| This looks great, congrats! As someone that has gone through
| Assimil courses and done lots of comprehensible input for various
| languages, language production is typically the weak point that
| isn't covered well. I've done plenty of lessons on iTalki, but
| I've been wanting something more structured and this seems like
| it could cover it. Definitely going to give it a shot!
|
| The feature request I make for all language course makers: please
| consider Bengali support in the future! It's wild to me that the
| 7th most spoken language in the world, with a deep culture around
| literature and poetry [1], gets zero attention from language
| course makers. I can buy an Assimil course on Breton, spoken by
| 200k people, and not Bangla, spoken by 284 million.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charyapada
| heeton wrote:
| I had a go and it failed at the first hurdle I'm afraid. It was
| hallucinating my responses and inserting phrases that I wasn't
| saying.
|
| The teacher kept switching into an American accent when I was
| trying to learn French and the responses were getting very slow
| bitty.
|
| Hopefully this is just an initial load of issues because the
| concept is great.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| Yes, this is weird. I said something like "I want to learn
| Spanisch to go shopping" and it just added "That's great" to my
| sentence.
|
| Also for the flash cards the audio that says the word starts at
| the same time with the audio for the example sentence.
| itake wrote:
| I'm trying to learn vietnamese, but the lessons are really really
| rough and borderline bad advice.
|
| ---
|
| AI: Anh met is good if ban are a man speaking about yourself. You
| can also say, "Em met" if you're a woman.
|
| this isn't correct. If you are of "older brother" age and are
| male, you say Anh. Em is for if you are "younger person" (does
| not matter the gender). Women tend to prefer being called "em"
| (even if they are older), because women prefer to be identified
| as younger than their true age... But that doesn't mean you can't
| call younger men em.
|
| A good tutor would know your age relative to theirs and explain
| this context.
|
| ---
|
| It would say english phrases with a vietnamese accent.
|
| ---
|
| It also would give me really complex vietnamese phrases that I am
| not ready for. when I prompt for an explaination or translation,
| it would get off track from the original thing we were learning.
|
| ---
|
| Way more people in Vietnam (and the globe) speak southern
| Vietnamese, but the tutors seem to be from north Vietnam.
|
| ---
|
| The STT also was very forgiving if I pronounced things
| incorrectly. Or it would confuse english and vietnamese. I would
| say, "Phai", but it heard "bye"
|
| ---
|
| I was ready to pull out my credit card, but I can't trust it to
| teach me the right information. I pay $160/mo for Vietnamese
| tutoring ($20 per class). This would be way cheaper and I don't
| have to schedule my classes.
| tempodox wrote:
| This sounds very much like the kinds of mistakes that LLMs
| typically make. It's a pity, I would love a good language
| learning platform.
| Velorivox wrote:
| A fundamental problem with language learning built around an
| LLM is that the _one_ thing you can guarantee is that no two
| people will have a consistent experience, nor is there ever
| going to be a 100% freedom-from-error. That makes it very
| hard to predict and therefore market what or how people will
| learn.
|
| I think this company will end up pivoting into a B2B context
| before long. Hopefully they will still stick to the mission,
| but who knows (and I wouldn't fault them if they don't -
| survival comes first).
| itake wrote:
| The trend I've seen in these AI tech companies is they
| launch their MVP using base models (or in this case fine
| tuning gpt4). This gives them enough traction for a seed
| round, but 2+ years later, they don't have the talent to
| actually improve the product beyond this.
|
| If OpenAI puts resources to language learning, they could
| build a great product. But 3rd party devs relying on
| someone's tech hasn't proven to be a good strategy.
| mariano54 wrote:
| We are really sorry for the subpar experience. We did not test
| Vietnamese, and it seems like the quality is not sufficient.
| Thanks for pointing out the issues.
| true_pk wrote:
| Hey, it's great to see other people learn Vietnamese! And your
| feedback is on point. I'm still at the beginning and just built
| a tool to help me learn basic phrases. I will very much
| appreciate the feedback! https://envn.app
| itake wrote:
| I haven't figured out what works for me yet when learning
| Vietnamese, so I'm not really sure yet was advice to give.
|
| Trying out your tool, I'd really like to know if the sound is
| north or southern Vietnamese. I think your tool is southern
| vietnamese, but idk.. I personally prefer learning southern,
| but all the AI TTS tools use the north dialect. Ideally, I'd
| like a 'pure' southern accent and not a hybrid.
|
| For your tool, You might want to get into the way to address
| people (Anh, em, ba, co, etc). You seem to just use toi
| (which I hear vietnamese people using with each other too...)
| but my understanding is the (Anh/Em/Ba/etc) are more
| 'intimate' whereas toi is more formal/business like?
|
| One idea I haven't tried too much of yet is making flash
| cards that teach me a sentence structure, but introduce new
| vocabulary. Learning a diaspora of phrases works for short
| 2-3 word ones, but when I try to learn more complex
| sentences, my brain isn't able to draw the patterns as
| nothing is connected.
|
| For example, trying to learn "ban ten la gi" and "nha ve sinh
| o dau" (from your website) is harder than learning "Ban ten
| la gi?", "Ban nghe la gi?", "Ban so dien thoai la gi?"
|
| The other huge challenge I have is feeling like I am making
| progress. I'm definitely getting better, but its pretty
| disheartening to study for 40+ hours and still can't
| pronounce words like Can Tho properly, despite knowing how to
| read and write.
|
| ---
|
| My email is in my profile. Feel free to reach out to me if
| you have more updates or want to bounce ideas.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| how're you handling latency on turn overlaps : buffered stream
| with early intent cutoff or full duplex with partial decoding?
| mariano54 wrote:
| We transcribe after 400ms of silence in 200ms chunks. 3 voice
| chunks (VAD) automatically interrupts, unless it's a back
| channel like "yeah" or "right" or something like that.
|
| Whisper can transcribe in <100ms. We then wait for the turn
| detection model, LLM, and tts to trigger a streamed response
| back to eh client.
| panarchy wrote:
| Hopefully people that use these AI language tutors don't end up
| being clowned on by native speakers because they sound like
| robots.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I'll try it, but that seems pricy compared to a Duolingo
| subscription. And while _I_ understand that they are different,
| will _your_ average lead know that?
| srameshc wrote:
| I like this https://labs.google/lll/en from Google
| Jimmyjohn619 wrote:
| This s super interesting! i have been wanting to learn other
| languages, but it i have been unsatisfied with most mainstream
| solutions. From what i have seen and for the price, i could see
| myself giving this a shot!
| madmod wrote:
| Edit: Never mind it seems to be an issue on my device.
|
| The faq wont expand on tap for me on android firefox. Dm me if
| you need more info.
|
| Looks like a great app and I can't wait to try it for Japanese!
|
| Can the cards be exported to anki?
| antonaf wrote:
| Exporting to Anki is something we're currently discussing, as
| various users have already requested this feature!
| lawrencechen wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| I tried the Japanese track. I'm a total beginner and the first
| lesson wasn't helpful at all. The AI asked about maybe mixing up
| Japanese<>English, but it didn't actually follow through. It
| either spoke fully in Japanese or fully in English. Maybe this is
| a standard practice for language lessons? I remember going to the
| first day of French class in a community college, and the teacher
| only spoke French, which was extremely overwhelming. Perhaps it's
| the standard way of teaching? Even if it is, I'm not sure if it
| works when compressed down to the shorter times I see myself
| opening the app.
| iandanforth wrote:
| Which spaced repetition algorithm are you using? I recently
| learned that there is a much improved one that has been adopted
| by Anki. (https://domenic.me/fsrs/) Have you adopted that as
| well?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Jarrett Ye, the creator of FSRS, is a big fan of Math Academy.
| He records some of his sessions and posts them to YouTube.
|
| https://x.com/JarrettYe
| mariano54 wrote:
| Yes we're using FSRS
| vlan121 wrote:
| Awesome, I was going back and forth with LLMs trying to keep a
| conversation up. You guys managed to channel those process, I
| think I will love this app!
| iandanforth wrote:
| Alright, having tried this with Japanese I can say it's
| frustrating. As a near complete beginner the tutor kept speaking
| in Japanese even when I said "sorry I don't understand"
| repeatedly and then when I asked it to start in English and then
| gradually transition to Japanese it lasted all of one sentence in
| English before switching back. I can totally see how this would
| be useful conversation practice if you've progressed that far,
| but I'd love to have something for even earlier beginners. Also
| since many of the models you use are natively multi modal this
| could readily integrate visual media for discussion and
| grounding.
|
| Also, for the transcription it would be great to get pure romanji
| to start with!
| antonaf wrote:
| Yes, I can understand and empathize with your experience. Quite
| honestly our current focus is more for B1+ students. That 0 ->
| 1 / bootstrapping of the language is much better served by
| traditional material that is less talking / listening-heavy.
| 55555 wrote:
| Unfortunately, I think you will soon learn that the market
| for advanced language learners is 1/500th the size of the
| market for beginner learners. But thank you very much and
| please keep focusing on us.
| iandanforth wrote:
| This is demonstrably false. Natural language acquisition is
| almost entirely listening and talking. The fastest and most
| consistently effective way to learn a language is immersion.
| The reason traditional material doesn't attempt immersive
| techniques is because it is _much much_ easier to print a
| static book than it is to produce interactive and adaptive
| content.
|
| The promise and potential of LLM based language learning apps
| is that you can cross that gap to full immersion in a way
| that has never been possible before.
|
| Please be more ambitious.
| npinsker wrote:
| Your comment sparked an idea of a conversation with an
| agent where at any time you could ask, "what's this word?"
| and it would respond with an image explaining it. I'm
| surprised there don't seem to be voice apps that integrate
| any visual content.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The reason traditional material doesn't attempt immersive
| techniques is because it is much much easier to print a
| static book than it is to produce interactive and adaptive
| content.
|
| No, that's not correct.
|
| First off, you can provide immersion with static books. A
| common favorite here on HN is _Lingua Latina per se
| illustrata_ [ "the Latin tongue explained by itself"].
|
| Second off, there are two reasons that traditional material
| doesn't do this. The biggest one is student demand; people
| are afraid of immersion. The second is that the traditional
| approach is faster. It's lower quality, and it tops out
| well below the level you hope to reach, but it's faster,
| not slower. It takes babies a year to learn to say they're
| hungry. It takes an elementary school class studying a
| foreign language less than a day.
| serjester wrote:
| Cool stuff! Probably one of the less popular languages, but I
| noticed that the transcription with Russian is often quite poor.
|
| Part of me loves this--no judgement, endless convenience, cheap.
| But another part mourns, sensing it strips away the grit, the
| stumbles, the soul of language learning. The kind that only comes
| from fumbling through conversations with another human.
|
| When I was learning Spanish, I used italki extensively and found
| having a live Columbian tutor invaluable and very affordable for
| most Westerners. It would genuinely make me sad if those
| excellent tutors start losing work to this kind of AI.
| titusaj92 wrote:
| THIS IS AMAZING!
| accidentalrebel wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this.
|
| I've been learning Arabic, and I noticed that the app uses Arabic
| script right from the start. This can be quite challenging for
| beginners who haven't learned how to read it yet. May I suggest
| adding an Englishized (romanized) version of the Arabic text to
| help ease the learning curve?
|
| It also seems to not listen to me when I asked to give me shorter
| sentences. It seems to not care that I'm struggling despite my
| pleading.
|
| I later switched to Spanish, which was a better experience. This
| one seems to listen to me better. I can ask the tutor to repeat
| what they said in English and give me shorter sentences, and
| thankfully, it does.
|
| Interacting with the tutors does feel I have to drive the
| conversation which is taxing. Compared to a human tutor, where I
| feel assured that I can be guided properly.
|
| Still an interesting app. Would love to try Spanish some more, in
| the future.
| runarberg wrote:
| A Japanese learner here (not commenting on this platform). I do
| recommend start using your target language script as soon as
| possible, maybe even earlier. The only exception are ideograms
| where you have to learn like 2000 unique characters, and even
| then you should learn the most common ones and start using them
| immediately.
|
| Reading in a non-familiar script becomes much easier the more
| you do it, and the longer you put off learning it, the more
| opportunities you miss for using it.
|
| I think you should only be using the latinized scripts in the
| absolute beginning where you are learning the most basic words
| and phrases like: "hello", "yes", and "no", and "what is your
| name?". This should only be for your first couple of weeks.
| After that you should have learned to read new words in the new
| script (albeit slowly). Learning the script makes everything
| much easier afterwards.
| qmmmur wrote:
| Is all this capital, energy and opportunity cost really worth
| displacing tutors who are already pretty cheap and demonstrably
| effective? I put AI language apps somewhere near fad diets, in
| that they appeal to the convenience mindset.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| It would probably be better to pick one or two languages,
| actually work with native speakers to make sure it's right.
|
| These "we cover every single language" tools get it like 75%
| right at best.
| 55555 wrote:
| I disagree because of how AI is progressing and because there's
| tons of neglected language markets they can pick up. Obviously
| your approach can work too, perhaps better. But 95% of language
| learning tools don't support Thai (my target language) for
| example so I am an eager user for that reason alone. I think
| they'll be able to make a generalized curriculum and have the
| AI use it in all languages.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| My tool supports Thai, if you'd like to try it -
| https://nuenki.app . I added it at the request of a user, who
| seems to be happy with it.
|
| It's a browser extension that finds English sentences in
| webpages, and translates the ones at your difficulty level
| into the language you're learning.
| adastra22 wrote:
| That's a pretty sick idea. Unfortunately I presume it
| involves sending your browsing data (e.g. page contents) to
| the server?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Would you rather have a tool that teaches you accurate
| conversational Spanish ?
|
| Or something that tries to teach 60 languages but does so
| poorly ?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Most of the generalized curriculum stuff out there is crap
| because languages differ from each other in substantial ways.
| LLMs in principle should help here as they can use their
| knowledge of the structure of the language to modify, but
| we're just not there with context windows and thinking
| capabilities. They will need at least a per-language (ideally
| per language pair) system prompt that contains a rough
| outline of the curriculum.
| brilee wrote:
| I'm a second-gen Korean-American; my korean is weak but
| conversational. I am intrigued by the reasoning model that
| analyzes my speech and points out various mistakes I'm making.
| It's a good first attempt at separating the 2 tracks of actual
| conversation vs mistake-correcting.
|
| I think showing the raw reasoning text is not quite the right UI;
| maybe highlighting the specific text in red and showing a
| suggested correction would work better?
|
| It's also a little awkward that the conversation is live; I don't
| really have any breathing room to read the reasoning traces on
| what mistakes I made / could have done better. I hung up the
| first time I tried to figure out how to pause.
| mariano54 wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. You might want to try manual mode,
| where you press enter or say "send" to trigger a response
| vunderba wrote:
| The ChatGPT mobile app in hands-free voice conversation mode
| works quite well for language practice with one important call-
| out: you have to give it a topic at the beginning otherwise it
| won't be able to drive the conversation forward and will stick to
| banal pleasantries.
|
| What I usually do is pick a random blurb in the news and paste
| the entire thing along with the Reuters link at the beginning and
| inform ChatGPT that we'll be carrying on language practice
| specifically over that topic of discussion.
|
| I've used this to carry an hour long foreign language practice in
| Spanish while walking my husky. Just put the phone in my pocket
| and go. If you're an intermediate/advanced learner, it's a pretty
| decent solution.
|
| In fact, you can actually instruct ChatGPT that you are going to
| speak in your native language, but ChatGPT is only allowed to
| respond in the target language if you just want to focus on
| practicing listening comprehension.
|
| I'd be interested in hearing how significantly improved Issen is
| over this.
| mariano54 wrote:
| Yeah, agreed, we started with a similar observation. These
| voice models are getting better quickly.
|
| You do need an app to create a holistic learning experience
| just for language learning. Customized curriculum, tons of
| prompting, AI models chosen for transcription accuracy,
| flashcards/dictionary, etc.
|
| We also support hands free mode, and many other things are
| customizable like slang, speaking speed, target language usage,
| etc.
| clarkalistair wrote:
| I've been waiting for someone to build this! Trying it out now
| clarkalistair wrote:
| Ok, so feedback from me.
|
| It asks me for my level; I'm half way through this audiobook
| (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Next-Steps-Spanish-Paul-
| Noble/dp/B0...), and have listened to the book before it a
| number of times, so I'd say I'm between beginner and
| intermediate. I think you could do better than a "what level
| are you, pick from 3 options" and throw you straight into a
| chat - ask some basic Spanish questions, and then try and
| figure out where the user is from there.
|
| Next I chose Blanca from Barcelona, and she said an awful lot
| of words and I understood very little of them, so I think I'm
| not ready. Half the grammar lessons have both a Spanish and
| English explanation, and half don't.
|
| I'll keep the feedback coming, but I'm on a train now and the
| questionable internet is not good enough for an actual
| conversation.
|
| (not at all relevant but I work for Devyce, from the YC S22
| batch!)
| chris_engel wrote:
| Sorry but the approach is too naive and the tech isnt there yet.
|
| You can't make up a couple of conversation topics and expect the
| LLMs to do the rest by just switching languages. People approach
| the same topics completely different in different languages. The
| app looks like someone picked a couple of topics and the rest is
| "just" ChatGPT advanced voice mode.
|
| And the worst thing is that the LLMs in TTS do not sound native
| and cannot teach you pronounciation and learning to listen and
| understand (which is the whole point in having spoken
| conversation).
|
| And the other way around, the STT will not notice pronounciation
| mistakes made by the student - so the app cannot tell you: oh,
| its pronounced like this.
| swairshah wrote:
| Just used it for French right now. The Design is excellent! but
| the LLM task orientedness needs some work. The tutor needs to
| follow the curriculum well. This has the same issue that I have
| in my day job i.e. keeping the LLM on topic. Its not _strict_.
| i.e. after asking it to make sure to remind me to reply in french
| it very easily forgets to do so. Its not following a structured
| approach or even in casual conversation isn 't correcting my
| mistakes unless I ask.
| personjerry wrote:
| Loom embeddings work in HN posts? Is that new?
| 55555 wrote:
| You must have the Loom chrome extension installed?
| 55555 wrote:
| I'm glad someone is building this! I was using this in Thai. I
| expected it to be awful. But it's actually very good. I only used
| it for a few minutes but will try to use it more later. It's
| possibly good enough for me to stop paying my tutor. However,
| please use a different Text to Speech model because the current
| Thai one sounds robotic, like the old (current?) Google
| Translate. This seems like a great product.
| antonaf wrote:
| Ok, thanks for the feedback. Who was your tutor for Thai,
| Supatra or Malee?
| jphelan wrote:
| I tried the app. I love that you're tackling this and I'm rooting
| for you. I'll tell you about myself, my experience, and my
| thoughts.
|
| I'm currently learning French as a beginner and I've learned
| other languages in the past. I've trued Duolingo as well as
| italki and frantasic as well as just ChatGPT. I am very familiar
| with Anki and I think it's critical to make your own flashcards
| by choosing images and sounds. I don't want auto cards.
|
| My experience with Issen:
|
| * it's frustrating when the conversation partner doesn't remember
| what it just said - it means I can't get a chance to ask que
| c'est que ca veut dire.
|
| * it's frustrating (just like with ChatGPT) that the conversation
| partner tends to interrupt and jump in while I'm thinking. I
| think many learners speak slowly and spend extra time thinking.
| ChatGPT allows you to hold the glowing circle and it won't
| interrupt while you do.
|
| I'd love to see the chat bubbles have more in depth features
| like:
|
| * much clearer indicator of hover or click words for translation,
| and more features like example sentences or click to pronounce
|
| * an option to ask for an explanation of some or all the text
|
| * for my own text I'd love to see feedback with more UI native
| elements about how accurately I pronounced each word and any
| grammatical mistakes I made. The text summary is a great start
|
| I found myself ignoring the features of the chat bubbles and only
| in writing this feedback did I notice them! They could maybe use
| more contrast and clear UI emphasis. Duolingo does a good job of
| making their UI very clear with this kind of feedback.
|
| I think it's important to build features that augment the app to
| work around LLM limitations. My guess is a lot of the settings
| change the prompt and that's great but I think it leaves too much
| room for hallucinations to nosedive the experience.
|
| I'd also love to see some way to have a hold to talk or something
| similar.
|
| I'm very conscious at this point about the cost of these lessons
| and I have a hard time finding the price. Frantastic is absurdly
| expensive and it made me switch to italki where human
| conversation is literally cheaper. Without differentiating more
| from ChatGPT I would have a hard time justifying an additional
| subscription to my wife!
|
| Edit: I found the pricing and it's a tough sell! ChatGPT is
| cheaper.
|
| I think you can both differentiate further from ChatGPT and keep
| cost down. I'd recommend to try to get more value out of each API
| call, so learners are more aligned with the cost per interaction-
| like make it so I'm enticed to spend a little longer reviewing
| the chat bubbles. My suggestions are mostly about how I want more
| engagement with each utterance anyway. Right now it's very
| tempting to just keep making more and more utterances and IMHO
| that drives up costs while being frustrating for me.
|
| I'd be happy to discuss! I wish you success.
| mel0n_ wrote:
| Have have you found to be the most helpful services/resources
| when learning French? I'm starting this journey
| jphelan wrote:
| Congrats! I'm happy to suggest some ideas. This is near and
| dear to me so I've got a lot to say lol. I think when
| beginning French the most helpful services for beginners
| relate to pronunciation and language comprehension because
| that is the "secret trick". Seriously, I recommend giving
| pronunciation/comprehension a lot of attention at first.
| There are only like 10-20 new sounds (plenty of resources to
| find the list if you search IPA French
| https://www.frenchcourses-paris.com/french-lessons-in-
| paris/... find one that clicks for you) so don't worry that
| it's too much even though I know it's hard and looks cryptic
| at first. I think most people end up mis-learning to read
| French like it's funny English then they will never have a
| good experience and certainly won't be able to have a
| conversation. I had the same experience with Chinese where if
| you don't learn tones at the start then it will always be
| miserable. For example in Chinese you can ask for dumplings
| and people literally just hear you saying sleep unless you
| add the right inflection (like the way we make a statement a
| question vs a demand).
|
| In terms of the exact resources for pronunciation - The
| Fluent Forever guy has a good anki deck for $12 (I bought it
| and I'd recommend it - just have patience and know he tends
| to over explain IMHO but the cards are linked in there and
| they're great) https://blog.fluent-forever.com/chapter3/ and
| I'd recommend finding your own favorite YouTube videos to
| explain how to pronounce the French R and nasal sounds. I
| would try watching some YouTube in French just to wet your
| beak. Know that it's frustrating to not yet have good
| comprehension but keep at pronunciation/comprehension and
| you'll get there.
|
| I recommend making Anki cards for like the top 100 and then
| the top 500 words, and include images and sounds (Anki
| strengths).
|
| I'd suggest to have a goal of understanding some rewarding
| things like children's T.V. (Bob l'eponge) or language
| learning YouTube (Easy French) - really fun. Then after you
| master some early words and feel like you have a "French ear"
| jump in and do some "early reader" kinds of book
| (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/short-stories-in-french-
| for...) because that will be really rewarding and
| reenforcing.
|
| I also recommend jumping in to italki probably earlier than
| you feel comfortable (or this app, as it continues to
| improve!) and doing some community conversations in just an
| unstructured way. Just be ready to try a couple people and
| find someone you like. If you can travel to France I think
| that is probably best, too! You'll be very happy that you've
| got a good "R" at this point.
|
| I think at that point you're ready to look at the A1/A2/B1/B2
| test content and learn it on your own pretty easily or work
| with a structured tutor. It should be chill and not too
| challenging at that point.
| raymondgh wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I tried using it for Thai language coming
| from English and found that the app understands me well! But I
| couldn't understand it at all. It replied to my turns with very
| long messages (20+ syllables) in pure Thai and spoke with an
| unnatural rhythm which made it hard to pick out words or phrases.
| The foreign alphabet made it really difficult too. I tried
| changing some settings in the bottom left menu and it started
| speaking English to me too, but I found it unbearably slow. At
| one point it asked me if I wanted it to speak in pure Thai or a
| mix and then ignored my answer. Ultimately as a beginner I don't
| think Issen will work for me very well as-is. Happy to check back
| in the future!
| adastra22 wrote:
| I haven't tried it out yet. I will. But I just want to say that I
| have wanted this to exist since I first used ChatGPT in 2022.
| Thank you for building it.
| plorntus wrote:
| Honestly tried it out, I wanted to like it but in its current
| form I found myself frustrated enough to just end the 'call' and
| close the app. Been learning Spanish for quite some time now so
| wasn't put off by the 'it always talks in X language' thing
| people are talking about.
|
| The thing that put me off was the speech recognition. I am not in
| a loud environment and I wasn't even talking and it was picking
| up responses and responding to it before I even opened my mouth.
| It blazed through the 'preferences' set up itself making up
| responses. Then when I did get to talk it just simply got my
| answers wrong. It would often interject too at random during my
| sentences.
| hahamaster wrote:
| Me too. Complete silence, headphones but recognized random
| words before I had a chance to say anything.
| deanc wrote:
| I built a basic version of this for myself with a prompt in chat
| gpt in an afternoon. It's great that you've built this yourself,
| but where's the magic? If it's your prompt it can probably be
| extracted in a few minutes by those who know how to do so.
| M4R5H4LL wrote:
| Why not finish, publish it to the store and get income if it
| was that straightforward? There's a long way to go between a
| toy application to demonstrate a product, and something on
| shelves actually selling. In other words, you can most often
| quickly tackle the concept or trivial parts of an app, but it's
| much harder to get a real product out, even if the
| implementation looks straightforward on surface.
| deanc wrote:
| That's exactly my point. This is at best a toy application
| driven by a prompt that many people will be able to extract
| and recreate. Putting the pieces together is easy and letting
| someone talk to an AI is not a particularly difficult
| problem. Creating magic and making people come back to learn
| the language is entirely different and I don't see anything
| magical here.
| owebmaster wrote:
| > Putting the pieces together is easy and letting someone
| talk to an AI is not a particularly difficult problem
|
| Exactly! Not difficult, right? Making and selling a product
| out of it is called marketing. It is not rocket science,
| but many engineers can't grasp it.
|
| GPT Wrappers are the new CRUD. There is no innovation in
| Trello, Jira and any other SaaS, they are just marketed
| products that thousands of people here in HN could code
| better, but they don't, because they are wasting their time
| pointing that other people's products are not a difficult
| problem to solve.
| deadbabe wrote:
| This is like the story of the businessman and the fisherman.
|
| Why on earth are you going to build out a whole product:
| doing marketing, security, incorporation, customer support,
| etc... just so you can finally arrive at the end result of...
| teaching yourself a language?
|
| The toy app is 100% of the value. You don't need all that
| other shit, you just need a really good prompt. It's exactly
| how you don't need to search websites anymore, just ask AI
| for the answer and get it immediately. You don't need a full
| app, just ask AI exactly what you want.
| owebmaster wrote:
| you think a chat UI is the apex UX? Most of us don't agree
| with that. On top of that, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini apps all
| sucks.
| deadbabe wrote:
| You don't get it, you can just tell an AI to build you a
| UI as some html page and use that.
| haiku2077 wrote:
| Never change, HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 :)
| deanc wrote:
| I knew this would be a reply. Dropbox was magical and just
| worked and took a huge amount of pain points away from a
| complicated protocol. Building an LLM wrapper doesn't make a
| product in 2025.
| vimy wrote:
| > We wanted something that would talk with us -- realistically,
| in full conversations -- and actually help us improve. So we
| built it ourselves. The app relies on a custom voice AI
| pipeline combining STT (speech-to-text), TTS (text-to-speech),
| LLMs, long term memory, interruptions, turn-taking, etc.
| Getting speech-to-text to work well for learners was one of the
| hardest parts -- especially with accents, multi-lingual
| sentences, and noisy environments. We now combine Gemini Flash,
| Whisper, Scribe, and GPT-4o-transcribe to minimize errors and
| keep the conversation flowing.
|
| Your prompt can't do this. I know because I've been trying to
| build something similar and a prompt just isn't enough. You
| need multiple LLMs and custom code working together to achieve
| realistic conversations.
| cpursley wrote:
| This is the language app I've always wanted to exist. Will try it
| out - really hoping it can create custom lessons for specific
| scenarios that I need to study for.
| mariano54 wrote:
| You should try re-generating a custom curriculum from the
| settings, and there you can prompt it to create specific lesson
| types.
| cpursley wrote:
| Which specific settings should I modify?
| jmyeet wrote:
| So this is the AI gold rush and of course this isn't the first AI
| language product I've seen of course. No hate to you or your
| product but I have a question.
|
| If AI succeeds, will we even _need_ language learning? Language
| learning is notoriously difficult and time-consuming. We 're
| rapidly approaching a future like Star Trek of universal
| translators.
|
| If so, what is the realistic future for AI language learning
| products?
| mariano54 wrote:
| I think so. Language learning is not just about practicality,
| it's about knowledge, culture, respect, and connection between
| people of different countries. If people have more free time
| and travel more, I expect language learning to grow.
|
| Plus, you can't do auto translation for languages like Japanese
| where the grammar is reversed. Auto translation has fundamental
| limitations.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| Nice! I've wanted this for years.
|
| Suggestion: you may be able to integrate SRS into the
| conversation. --- you could encourage the model to use certain
| words, and more importantly you can track the student's active
| use of words that are on the review list, basically acting as if
| it were an SRS step. -- this could totally eliminate the need for
| flashcards.
| mariano54 wrote:
| Yeah this is a really great idea, perhaps you can sample tokens
| based on some kind of SRS and I+1 sentence system. Kind of like
| a graded reader but for speaking. Will definitely look into
| this in the future
| golergka wrote:
| Great work! I'm learning Spanish in Argentina, and most of the
| apps that offer it just have Mexican or Spain variants of the
| language. I think it's the first time I see a selection of
| different virtual tutors with regional dialects.
| tmaly wrote:
| I want to build some AI tutors at home to help my kids with some
| of their school subjects and interests. I help them with subjects
| I know, but for other subjects I often do not have enough
| background. What are you best tips/ideas/design patterns you
| learned when making this app?
| mariano54 wrote:
| Some random tips which could help you
|
| - Don't go over 10k tokens in the prompts as the intelligence
| and memory degrades
|
| - Summarize sessions and save the summaries, potentially
| summarize the summaries as well
|
| - use VAPI or realtime api if you want to build fast. Building
| the full pipeline takes a while
|
| - try out different models and see how personality varies. Our
| favorite is gpt4.1 with temperature 1.
|
| - goal system. The promot should always contain the current
| goal, and the next goal. Evaluate goals with another LLM, and
| dynamically change the prompt
| iNic wrote:
| Very impressive, but still has the same problem that seemingly
| all voice modes that I have tried have which is that the
| Cantonese voice has a Mandarin accent, and sometimes just
| straight up uses Mandarin pronunciations.
| gwintrob wrote:
| I have this complaint too! I was impressed that they included
| Cantonese but it's frustrating that I don't know when it's
| pronunciation/accent is off. Have you found any other tools
| that work well for learning Cantonese as an English speaker?
| iNic wrote:
| Sadly there isn't one perfect resource. I find Hambaanglaang
| kinda useful. The complete cantonese books are good. And I
| have just started making flash cards. But, I am still just a
| beginner so take it with a huge grain of salt!
| leonidasv wrote:
| Question: ChatGPT voice mode seems to have too much tolerance for
| mispronouncing. Sometimes, it understands you even you
| mispronounce something in a phrase, and it's not aware enough to
| correct you - it even says your pronunciation is correct if
| asked. It's good at grammar, though.
|
| It makes me think the audio goes through a kind of voice-to-text
| model before the answer, so nuance is lost; or the model wasn't
| trained to distinguish between correct and incorrect
| pronunciations.
|
| Does Issen have this issue too? Pronunciation vices are common
| when you're learning a new language.
| mariano54 wrote:
| Yes we do have this issue, but it's improved a bit over chatgpt
| due to using multiple transcribers.
|
| The models are improving though, and they are at a very good
| place for English at the moment. I expect by next year we will
| switch over to full voice to voice models.
| harles wrote:
| This reply seems to miss the question, or at least doesn't
| answer it clearly. Is this service overly tolerant of
| mispronunciations? Foundational models are becoming more
| tolerant, not less, over time which is the opposite of what
| I'd want in this case.
| mariano54 wrote:
| It's less tolerant of mispronunciations. There is custom
| promting to explicitly leave in mistakes and to not fix
| them. It's still not perfect and it (the speech to text
| module) sometimes corrects the user's pronunciation
| mistakes.
| konovalov-nk wrote:
| In general there aren't really models that can understand
| nuances of your speech yet. Gemini 2.5 voice mode changed that
| only recently and I think it can understand emotions but I'm
| not sure if it can detect things like accent and
| mispronouncing. The problem is data, we need a large corpus of
| data labeled how exactly the audio sample is mispronouncing the
| word, so the model can cluster those. Maybe self-learning
| techniques without human feedback can do it somehow. Other than
| that I'm not seeing how this is even possible to train such
| model with what's currently available.
| zygy wrote:
| Glad you're working on this. Duolingo is garbage and I've been
| hopeful that AI can help accelerate language learning in a way
| that is actually effective.
| aizk wrote:
| Nice! I'm curious if your software can pick up really subtle
| details - like for instance, pitch accent in Japanese (which is
| basically NEVER covered in a beginner level course) but is useful
| to just be aware of as a language learner.
| mariano54 wrote:
| Thanks! No, it cannot do this yet, as it's using a pipeline of
| voice to text to voice. I think models are heading in that
| direction, and voice to voice models are getting better.
|
| For pitch accent, shadowing is a great way to improve. You can
| pause and repeat the tutors messages for example, or read out
| the word when doing flashcard reviews (copying the flashcard
| audio).
| dinkblam wrote:
| tried it in Safari, didn't hear anything of the intro sentence
| after choosing a voice and then i got
|
| "Error An unknown error has occurred."
|
| has this been tested on Safari?
| 0b01 wrote:
| Portuguese should have the flag of Brazil.
|
| Don't dim screen on iPhone during conversation.
|
| The tutor should terminate the lesson when its goals are achieved
| and do a warm handoff.
|
| Overall it's quite good.
| carstenhag wrote:
| Haven't tested the functionality yet, but some feedback:
|
| - the name is bad. Issen? I (German, Spanish speaker) don't know
| how to pronounce it.
|
| - use correct flags. Catalan speakers will be rightfully pissed
| when you use the Spanish flag for their language.
|
| - in a language learning focused app, it is not acceptable to
| have a badly translated app. I'm using it in German and while the
| intro does not have typos, I can tell it's all just AI blubber
|
| - For German specifically, I'd recommend you to use "du" and not
| "Sie" ("Wie heissen Sie?") across the app. If your tool isn't
| aimed at 60+ year old BMW drivers, use "du".
| npinsker wrote:
| The English intro feels non-native too, and does have a typo
| ("You'll be truly amazed of how polished [...]"), which makes
| me think it _wasn't_ AI.
| mpeg wrote:
| Catalan, the language, does not have a flag. As a native
| speaker (of a dialect) who is not from Catalonia I would much
| rather the language be represented by the Spanish national
| flag. Although people from Andorra might also not love that.
|
| Languages and flags don't mix well.
| carstenhag wrote:
| I am not sure if I got you, are you aware of the
| cultural/political issues around it? There's no flag for the
| language (as it's used at many places), but almost everyone
| will be happy with a commonly known flag they can identify
| with. A Valencian will be fine with a Catalunya flag :)
| mpeg wrote:
| The cultural/political issues are deeper than you'd think,
| there are some within Catalonia that would claim all of us
| Catalan speakers as part of the same cultural umbrella,
| negating our own cultural background as derivative.
|
| That's why I say that I personally (as a Mallorcan) would
| much prefer the language to be associated with a Spanish
| flag than a Catalan flag. Some people would agree and some
| would disagree - ultimately the best thing is to not link
| flags to languages anyway.
|
| To give you another example from Issen, they're also using
| the American flag for English which is probably even more
| controversial :)
| celebdor wrote:
| All the areas where Catalan is spoken as a mothertongue:
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alghero
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andorra
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balearic_Islands
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyr%C3%A9n%C3%A9es-Orientales
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valencian_Community
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aragon
|
| All of them share the coat of arms of the crown of Aragon: ht
| tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_the_Crown_of_A...
| . Thus using the "four red pallets on a gold background"
| represents all the speakers in different European countries.
| diggan wrote:
| Academically, maybe it doesn't have a flag. But the de facto
| flag is the Senyera and I don't think a lot of people _wouldn
| 't_ recognize it as such in Spain.
| magackame wrote:
| I wonder if anyone ever came up with logos or at least emoji
| codes for languages?
| Twey wrote:
| Also on the controversial flags side: using the British flag to
| represent Welsh
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| Someday someone will release a good AI based language learning
| app, because it's the obvious use of the technology.
|
| That person will have a hellish time marketing it because
| projects like this will have so thoroughly primed us to assume
| its slop.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Hey! Can you add a feature that can record my lessons with a real
| human and then build a way for me to practice all the things we
| covered in the lesson? Would pay for this feature if it worked
| well!
| runarberg wrote:
| I tried a 20 minute conversation, as a beginner Japanese learner
| (mid-to-high A1).
|
| My first problem was setting my native language truthfully to
| Icelandic which seemed to confuse both me and the AI tutor. We
| spoke together in Japanese but asking how to say a word in
| Japanese but giving the Icelandic word didn't quite work, giving
| the word in English worked much better.
|
| Now as a beginner I don't think this service is right for me. It
| is very hard to have a conversation--even a basic one--at my
| level and I didn't actually learn that much as I wasn't able to
| say anything. I did however learn that I need to practice
| creating sentences on my own, and I need to practice speaking,
| but honestly I would much rather do that via structured exercises
| from a textbook then from an AI tutor (or a human tutor for that
| matter). I have been skipping those exercises in the textbook
| that I use, so I guess having that 20 min conversation did indeed
| help me realize what I need to focus on. So I guess thanks for
| that.
|
| A more useful feedback from a beginner's perspective. Taking your
| time between sentences is something you can do with an AI tutor
| which you can't do with a human tutor, so I recommend you add
| stuff like dictionaries and grammar keys which beginners can look
| up before starting the next sentence.
|
| I would also like to see some basic note-taking, or even message
| drafting, such that you can type in a draft before you start
| speaking your next sentence. I don't think intermediate speakers
| would need these as they can just ask the AI tutor during the
| conversation, but for beginners it is nice to have some written
| materials as you practice.
| AndyKelley wrote:
| It's very cool, I'm enjoying playing with it.
|
| Feedback: The tutor pronounces some obvious things wrong that
| contradicts the words. Two examples: Qi Mie noRen - it
| pronounced Ren wrong despite the furigana being correct. It also
| kept pronouncing ha as "ha" even when used as topic particle in
| more complex sentences. Edit: also observed Shi iFang pronounced
| "saifou" - no idea what's going on there. It was in a mixed
| english-japanese message.
|
| I think I would pay for this if I wasn't worried about learning
| mispronunciations or errors.
|
| Oh, more feedback: focus the app on the conversation with the
| tutor and leave the memorization to Anki - just let us export
| those words we struggle with to CSV or something so we can import
| into existing vocab workflows.
| mariano54 wrote:
| May I ask which tutor you were using? The TTSs have different
| strengths and weaknesses.
|
| Good idea on the export, will add that to our to-do list.
| AndyKelley wrote:
| Aoi (it was 1st in the list)
| faustocarva wrote:
| Pretty cool, tested it!
| Twey wrote:
| I put in my name but it insists I am called Anton.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I also use chatGPT to translate phrases idiomatically and to ask
| questions about etymology, synonyms, homophones etc. I'm not sure
| I would want the entire language-learning process to be driven by
| talking with an AI so maybe I'm not the target audience for this
| app but these are the places where I think an AI can be uniquely
| useful in language learning.
|
| I recently discovered www.lingq.com and it's by far the best
| language learning tool I've tried. The concept is that each
| learner brings the content they personally want to engage with -
| so it allows you to import articles, podcasts, and videos and
| then read them in your target language but translate words you
| don't recognize on the fly. It tracks the words you know and the
| ones you are learning automatically, and allows you to test
| yourself with flashcards based on the words in the content you
| care about.
|
| This is great because if you just want to read eg. French
| articles about cybersecurity, you will quickly start to pick up
| the domain-specific words.
|
| The problem is that the site is quite buggy, and needs a lot of
| UX/UI polish. I get the sense it's a small team, but they've been
| around for over a decade and it's still not polished.
|
| I don't want to use an inferior clone of Anki, I just want deep
| integration with Anki. I want importing content to be as painless
| as possible, including subscribing to podcasts.
|
| My ideal language-learning tool would be something like LingQ
| with all the bugs fixed and features implemented, and with AI
| integrated in the places it makes sense, not as the primary means
| of engagement with the app.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| You might like my tool. It has the same general principle as
| LingQ - learning from content you actually want to read -
| except it applies it to all web browsing. It's a browser
| extension that finds sentences in webpages, scores them by
| difficulty, then translates the ones that are right at the edge
| of your knowledge.
|
| https://nuenki.app
|
| I haven't added Anki integration, though. A few people have
| asked for it, but it's a big time investment for something
| relatively niche.
| dbuxton wrote:
| For me this is great for practice (I tried Russian). However the
| big missing piece for all these language learning apps is the
| lack of support for spotting and correcting errors in your
| pronunciation - as long as you say the word more or less right,
| the transcription gives you a pass.
|
| I am very excited for the whole STT/TTS to go away and for us to
| have models that really "hear" exactly what you said.
|
| Sometimes this is about accent but a lot of the time, the AI
| won't spot areas where you e.g. fudge a case ending or the stress
| on a word. Yes, you can get some of that pronunciation right by
| the AI repeating back with the correct stress or clear case, but
| you never really get the confidence that you would get from an
| actual human.
|
| Another product suggestion - turn off transcription (at least for
| the tutor side of the conversation; I'd suggest both). Personally
| I find it distracting at best for languages I already speak well
| and a crutch for those I don't.
|
| Finally, I find it really very hard to enjoy having a random
| conversation that's not very directed ("What interests you most
| about artificial intelligence?"). I'd suggest that there are ways
| of making it more goal focused without being explicitly gamified
| - maybe something like, here's a position and you have to
| persuade me (AI debate club!), or something that brings out an
| actual opinion or relates to a concrete experience ("what's your
| main goal in your job this year").
|
| Overall though this is the first product I've seen in this space
| that I might actually use, so well done.
| mariano54 wrote:
| The persuasion lesson sounds like a great idea, we haven't
| thought of that. Yeah voice to voice models will be amazing.
| There is significant progress from openai/gemini, and we plan
| to use them when they are ready.
| joshtucholski wrote:
| feels like i should be asked to tell it my name, not type it
| mariano54 wrote:
| The issue with that is people with less common names will get
| the wrong transcription, and there's nothing worse that seeing
| your name spelled wrong over and over
| anonu wrote:
| The conversation flows nicely. Certainly nicely built.
|
| I thought this interaction in Spanish was interesting:
|
| I said something like: Yo pienso que tu eres una inteligencia
| artificial. Es muy interesante.
|
| Carlos responded: En realidad, soy una persona real llamada
| Carlos, aunque a veces hablo con muchos estudiantes como tu, como
| si fuera un robot
| mariano54 wrote:
| Ouch it looks like all the personality promoting has made it
| confused about its identity.. thanks for pointing it out
| forkerenok wrote:
| I see some rough edges typical to LLM-powered products, but this
| is still a fantastic tool!
|
| I think it needs push-to-talk mode, because it's picking up every
| surrounding noise.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| I learned Spanish to an advanced level (B2) many years ago with a
| combo of Duolingo, Anki flashcards, and real tutors. One of my
| biggest regrets is focusing too much on the grammar and
| vocabulary and not enough on having conversations with natives.
| I'm convinced it would have taken me half the time to reach B2 if
| I had focused more on conversations. I think this app is going to
| be really effective. Congrats to you guys on the launch!
| tietjens wrote:
| I would like something like this particularly for learning
| specific styles of programming. For example, in order to grasp
| functional programing.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Congrats on your app and love it so far! Already sent it to over
| a dozen family members. Curious about a couple of things
|
| - I see only two employees on LinkedIn -- how were you able to QA
| all these different languages with just two people?!
|
| - I tried Urdu and the app did quite well. But curious why you
| have two female voices and not any male voice?
|
| - I realize Sesame is a much bigger team, but curious what you
| think they are doing that makes their voices feel so real and
| seamless. I dont think they do multiple languages so I think you
| have a harder problem of course.
| mariano54 wrote:
| Thank you so much for that!
|
| We focused on testing and tweaking the most popular ones, we
| have not tested some of the niche ones. We have removed
| languages that users have told us have major issues, but there
| are still some left.
|
| The voices are due to the quality of the TTS services that we
| use. Openi, 11labs, minimax. Some services don't have many or
| even 1 good voice. We will add more over time
|
| Sesame also passes in the users voice into the TTS model so
| that it can vibe well with the users tone and mood, whereas we
| are just using raw TTS. Their latency is also very low, but
| this is not quite suitable for language learning.
|
| In the future we hope to move to full voice to voice models,
| once those become mature and intelligent enough.
| n0tbl0nd3 wrote:
| The website is a bit buggy (Safari). The session should start
| with a 'hi!' from the tutor ?? I got confused whether my mic was
| working, refreshed a couple of times until I prompted it myself.
| I tried it in my native language, Romanian: the speech to text is
| bad for Romanian and I got a random non-Romanian word within the
| first 30 seconds of using it (I assume it was meant to say
| "hello!") and gave up. For German, which I am learning: I agree
| with others it is too unstructured. Also the transcription for my
| speech was wrong, it didn't correct me on it and I got frustrated
| again.
| hahamaster wrote:
| Tried it is Safari, frustrating, confusing, spent some time
| figuring it out and closed the tab. I didn't say anything but the
| app kept "recognizing" some random words and "answering" tutor's
| questions... looks like pre-alpha version.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Also I noticed your app doesn't work without a network
| connection, so i'm assuming you're doing all the TTS and STT
| server-side. Curious how practical that is w/r/t latency? Any
| plans to doing it all on-phone?
|
| (probably a more fringe request, but i'm asking because I do all
| my language learning on the commuter trains w/o a good
| connection.)
| mariano54 wrote:
| Exactly, it's all server side. There are no plans for this. The
| main issue I see with doing it in device is the LLM piece. Even
| with some large models like llama 4 maverick, the tutor just
| struggles to properly teach and understand the student, it's
| not viable IMO.
|
| Intelligence is super key here, especially as the context size
| gets larger (due to memory) and intelligence degrades.
|
| Another major issue is TTS voice quality, but this seems to be
| improving a lot for small local models.
|
| EDIT: You're right, latency is also a big deal. You need to get
| each piece under a second, and the LLM part would be especially
| slow on mobile devices.
| fode wrote:
| Ok, in over a decade on HN I've never commented on a product but
| this one is awesome! I just signed up!
|
| I currently pay $99 a month to learn Spanish from a live tutor 30
| mins a day, and this is far superior if you ask me.
|
| The element that stands out to me is that the AI Tutor is
| consistent and concise!
| tanushv wrote:
| This might be the most obvious question regarding this, but how
| are you planning on competing with the entrenched competition for
| mindshare, namely Duolingo. This is probably technically
| superior, but from a user standpoint, it might not be so. Happy
| to be proven wrong
| AndyKelley wrote:
| Every serious language learner already considers Duolingo to be
| trash. It's not real competition.
| mariano54 wrote:
| Our market is different - ISSEN is more focused on intermediate
| and advanced students, and especially those that are willing to
| use a more difficult app in order to learn faster.
|
| Also, having the AI voice tutor as our main feature allows us
| to iterate quickly, and be well positioned for future
| improvements in AI models.
|
| As for marketing and GTM, we're in the super early stages, and
| there is definitely a lot of competition out there, it won't be
| easy.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Very interesting, but 20 minutes seems very low to fully try a
| language learning app. would you consider extending to a few
| hours?
| vibranium wrote:
| How does this compare to Langua?
| mariano54 wrote:
| Langua is a nice app with more features than ISSEN. We focus on
| the voice chats, and I think our tech is better (intelligence,
| latency, realtime flow, voices, etc), especially for non
| english/spanish.
|
| We are aiming to create a long term companion/tutor that gets
| to know you more and more, and can create customized
| curriculums, lessons, etc.
| vibranium wrote:
| I've tried Greek (Athena voice) and the accent is terrible. It
| sounds like an English or American person speaking Greek!
| mariano54 wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out. Did you try the other ones by any
| chance?
| BrandiATMuhkuh wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch.
|
| I wish you great success.
|
| Focusing on speaking first, and not writing makes so much sense.
| As a father I could first hand experience how my child learned 3
| languages (German, English, Arabic) without reading/writing
| first.
|
| The hardest part for you will likely be the "curriculum". It's
| "easy" to make something that works for a couple of weeks. But
| language learning takes years.
|
| Btw, if you are up for it, I would enjoy chatting with you. -> I
| co-founded an AI math tutoring company, and focused my PhD on how
| to influence human language with AI. Hint: Social connections
| between humans and AI.
|
| What you are trying to solve is something I dreamed about for
| years.
| ianbicking wrote:
| I've been thinking and playing slightly with this concept myself.
| A few thoughts:
|
| 1. Using a standard transcription service is pretty tricky
| because it's going to correct the user's speech. Or make it
| incorrect! Standard transcription is predicated on the speaker
| saying things correctly.
|
| 2. I've tried sending the audio directly to OpenAI to address
| this issue. I can't say if it works or not. It's very hard to
| test or understand a system without a transcript as a source of
| truth!
|
| 3. I'd like to learn a new language as a beginner, and all of
| these AI systems work poorly for this. It's great to immerse the
| learner in the language, but if you know NOTHING then it's not
| that helpful.
|
| 4. Language learning needs to be MUCH more multimodal than a
| standard chat. Especially as a beginner.
|
| 5. The AI should be generating translations and explanations
| alongside its responses. I'd like to be able to inspect
| everything the AI says (in the language I'm learning) to
| understand it.
|
| 6. Emoji would be another easy way to annotate the text.
|
| 7. I think giving the user/AI a subject to talk about would be
| helpful. Again, a subject that is not language-based would be
| great, like an image or something.
|
| 8. As a very new learner I would like an experience where I
| respond in my native language and then I'm told how to translate
| this to the language I'm learning. This should include a
| pronunciation guide. Then I should repeat the phrase I'm given.
|
| 9. I should still be able to ask questions in my native language
| and probably get a response in my native language. But with some
| prompting the AI should be able to distinguish these two cases.
|
| 10. For low latency it's nice if you produce the spoken text
| quickly, but you still have the opportunity to get the LLM to
| produce _more_ material immediately after. This is where things
| like translations can be produced.
|
| 11. You probably don't have timestamps on your TTS, but if you
| did and could highlight words as they were spoken that would be
| _great_. Probably worth choosing a TTS provider with that in
| mind.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| Gave it a shot, but mostly found it unable to keep up an
| interesting conversation. There's a lot of similar apps and they
| all have the same issue.
| xmodem wrote:
| I'm at a roughly A2 - B1 level at the language I'm learning and I
| picked up a whole lot of pretty basic grammar errors in the first
| conversation.
|
| The app also used a bunch of constructions I'm not familiar with
| even though I specified I'm a beginner.
|
| If I hired a human tutor and had this experience, I would ask for
| my money back.
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