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.
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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!
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.