nowfound

AI · June 7, 2023

IB

I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking

Hello Hacker News, When learning foreign languages, I made the most progress by speaking them throughout the day, every day. So I made a site where you can *speak* to an AI language teacher to practice both listening and speaking. # The product *What I have now:* * Multilingual speech recognition: You can ask a question in English and get an answer in your target language. * Feedback on your grammar. * Suggestions: See examples of what to say next to keep the conversation flowing. * Speed: Choose a lower speed for beginners or a faster one for advanced levels. * Translations: Click to see a…

In plain words

An AI-powered language learning platform that lets users practice speaking with an artificial instructor through conversation. The tool offers multilingual speech recognition, grammar feedback, adjustable speaking speed, vocabulary suggestions, and role-playing scenarios across multiple languages including English variants, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. It's designed for language learners who want daily speaking practice to build fluency through interactive dialogue.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hello Hacker News, When learning foreign languages, I made the most progress by speaking them throughout the day, every day. So I made a site where you can *speak* to an AI language teacher to practice both listening and speaking. # The product *What I have now:* * Multilingual speech recognition: You can ask a question in English and get an answer in your target language. * Feedback on your grammar. * Suggestions: See examples of what to say next to keep the conversation flowing. * Speed: Choose a lower speed for beginners or a faster one for advanced levels. * Translations: Click to see a translation into English (or another language). * Role-playing: Practice real-life situations. * Available to learn American English, British English, Australian English, French, Spanish from Spain, Spanish from Mexico, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Russian, and more. *What I'd like to add:* * More Situations/Characters/Customizations: A "Creator mode". * Feedback on your pronunciation. * Text-based responses (Type or click – would feel like a "Create Your Own Adventure" book!) * A dictionary. * Phonetics: Zoom in and repeat a sound to help you hear phonemes and words more clearly. * …and so much more!… # The startup Been working on this for 6-7 months now. I love this project and got lots of laudatory comments about it, but still find it hard to make it take off. 31% of people come back to it, traffic is growing through word of mouth with language teachers in schools or Telegram or private intranets sharing it with others. So that's nice. But nice words alone don't pay the bills. My goal is to achieve enough growth to cover costs, which would then allow me to focus 100% on the product (currently it's more like 50% of my time). But I'm not there yet. A challenge I see is that most places forbid self-promotion. So I'm just not sure how on Earth I'm supposed to have a product take off. I could pay for ads, but I use AdBlock everywhere so this feels out of character. I'm a big fan of Pieter Levels (@levelsio on Twitter) because he's doing things solo, so I'm trying to emulate the same kind of success. But it seems that something is missing. What features would you find most useful? How can I better market this without resorting to ads? Thanks for reading! If you've got thoughts or ideas, I would love to hear them. Cheers, Fabien

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