Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

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.

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.

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah we need to improve the beginner experience, it's more tailored towards intermediate/advanced students at the moment.

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).

So basically if you are starting a new language from zero, then this is not for you?

Why wouldn't intermediate/advanced students just talk directly to ChatGPT? From what I see, I thought your value prop was for the beginners.

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.

That's correct.

I think the point here is for you to practice (i.e. develop "muscle memory" for speaking), not to learn.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

As an intermediate German speaker I thought it was great!

I also got Anton. Looks like something's hard coded - or maybe a caching issue?

As far as using language goes, those aren't different things.

Language Transfer[0] will continue to be a better resource than any AI course. It’s very hard to beat a human that has put in time crafting a logical way to teach a language with the appropriate ramp ups. The Greek course on there is fantastic. And it’s free with zero ads. Best language learning tool I’ve ever used period.

[0]: https://www.languagetransfer.org/

What's the best way to listen to this on your mobile in a way that will remember your location? SoundCloud app?

They have their own app. It’s pretty minimal but it does save your spot.

Agreed, languagetransfer is fantastic. Much better than any "AI tutor".

I see it now, thank you! This looks like what I was hoping for. I wonder if there's some way to communicate very clearly that you'll need to talk for around n minutes to get a structured curriculum prepared - and maybe even show a progress bar of some sort so the user can have an idea of when they're going to get to "the good stuff"?

Another thing is that the trial period seems incongruent. To me the structured curriculum is what I really want to _try_. I want to see what the planned lessons are like, how guided they are, etc. But the trial runs out and tries to make me pay right after the unstructured more all-over-the-place feeling introductory conversation, and I'm not prepared to pay at that point since I feel like I haven't gotten to evaluate the main part of the product at all. I would suggest leaving the trial unlocked to maybe the first three structured lessons of the learning plan. Let the user really experience what they'll be paying for.

I'm not sure that would solve the problem. Ultimately this (and speaking with LLMs in general) feels a lot like filling in an adaptive form rather than talking to a human being. The LLM, for example, is never going to go on and tell you some anecdote from its life (and if it were prompted to do so it would come across as quite insincere). It's not going to say, "Oh that neighborhood is not safe," when you tell it about where you'll live when studying abroad. It's not going to recommend supplementary material (or worse, it will...with broken links that never existed).

I'm not even sure this helps with speaking practice since it's just a test of whether what you said can be transcribed by Whisper, which is not at all a test of correct pronunciation. I just tried it with the most horrid, butchered accent I could muster, and it still worked...if I practiced for months on end like that, I'd end up in a very difficult place as a language learner.

Agree, it was a game changer for me with Spanish. Learning a second language is just plain hard and LT is the closest to “a breakthrough” I think we will get, but it’s still hard and people don’t like that.