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.
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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!
These "we cover every single language" tools get it like 75% right at best.
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.
- There's a global blacklist of sites, as well as phrases in the title/URL (e.g. "bank")
- You can blacklist sites yourself
- Each sentence is run against filters checking for medical/legal/etc info, as well as checks for addresses, card/social security numbers, etc. All the checks are done client side
- There are also some special implementations, e.g. it looks at the source code of websites to work out if they're an instance of an American health portal that I've forgotten the name of - each doctor's surgery self-hosts it.
- Websites can add `nuenki-ignore=true` on their end, if they'd like to disable it.
And of course it doesn't log anything, though there is an anonymous cache in order to make it economical.
"Translate Isolated Words" allows it to translate "sentences" of only one word, but it doesn't disable full sentences.
And yeah, atm it word splits by spaces for the dictionary. I hadn't thought to do it with LLMs, though that's a good idea. There's a somewhat related problem when doing Furigana, where it has a hashmap of strings-to-pronunciations, and it starts with a 4-character sliding window looking for matches, then a 3 character, etc.
At the moment I'm focused on translation quality, but I intend to add that.