1. In some of the comments, you say that this app is aimed at “b1 and higher”. That’s fine. But then the demo video shows content that ranges from A1 to possibly up to C1 (the interview, depending on the job). This seems to be cutting the baby in half. There’s a market for both of these types of tasks, but rarely does one person want both.

2. The TTS voice in French is not very good. ChatGPT default is smoother.

3. I will give your app a solid run through later, but in general, I think that having one-click options for threshold level tasks would be wildly popular. For B1, this might be a link to a news article on a current event and structured tasks and discussion about that article. For C1, it might include more tasks on nuance, inference, and cohesion (as a few examples). Many people don’t even realize that their speech lacks certain elements like cohesion throughout a text (written or spoken), so pointing those about as critical features of the threshold proficiency level would be super useful.

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've been living in Buenos Aires for over 18 years now, so my pronunciations and accent is quite good. It's just that I never had the proper early fundamental foundations of grammar ..so I have a bunch of embarrassing holes that need filling -- this app is quite precise when it comes to focusing on those aspects.

Te felicito!

Ps my only nit pick so far is the UX on ios > the Settings modal > when opened there is no clear CTA to close it. Because the click-state of the settings button is 97% the same color as the non-click state.

Solution : 1 - add a close X button to the top right (standard accessibility)

2 - change the click-state Color of the settings button to a reverse color or accent color.

Want more UX tear-downs? Dm me artur at visualsitemaps.com

Also Japanese specifically has this meme where it literally is a pitch-accent language but many people say it's not and teaching resources ignore it. E.g. 'ima' means either 'now' or 'living room' depending if syllable #2 is higher or lower. Clearly only applies to some languages, but is another dimension even harder to a learner to know there's a mistake. I have to imagine even other Latin languages probably have reading quirks where this could happen to me.

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?

---

AI: Anh mệt is good if bạn are a man speaking about yourself. You can also say, “Em mệt” 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.

Also, for the transcription it would be great to get pure romanji to start with!

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.

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.

But this is not real life - I tried to "flag" the tutor with sentences that I don't understand, and I am way over my head, and it just chugs along, with long sentences, totally unaware.

The service should not advertise itself as having a beginner level at all, in my opinion.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

These "we cover every single language" tools get it like 75% right at best.

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.)

A few comments from the 20min trial I had:

- About the positive aspects: There were definitly parts of the conversation where I was genuinely suprised with the naturalness. Overall, I felt that the demo already helped me practice my output a bit. From this, I definitely believe that AI-based language tutors might become quite widespread soon as they could become really good language exchange partners. In my case, I still have low speaking skills (~Japanese N4, A2), so just having any chance to practice verb conjugations etc is already immensily helpful.

- I also like that there is no gamification aspect. I prefer apps where users can decide how they use them. A lot of Japanese learners, people already use anki for vocab, etc., so forcing extra vocab practice would me definitly quit the app.

Some feedback for improvement:

- Due to my still low speaking skills, I often need mid-sentence pauses which are at least 1-2 seconds long. When I pause, the sentence is already half-transcribed, sometimes in another language. I think I had moments where then the sentence is cut-off entirely. At least, it makes me pressured to finish the sentence in a fluent manner without much pauses.

- I know you want to have multilingual transriptions, but maybe you could add some language bias in transcribing the speech?

- About the cutting off: If you have some sort of VAD frontend: Maybe you could adjust its parameters based on estimated language skills of the users (beginners have longer pauses)

- I saw that my sentences were rated. But they were rated only in text, even though I said that my mistakes should be corrected right away (The speech-based AI partner just kept on talking about the topics). Maybe I have overlooked something, but is there some overview of my mistakes besides the text-based corrections?

I'll try to give it a chance later today if I can find some room for it.

My main fear of anticipated deception is that it won't give me feedback on how out of the track my pronunciation can be deemed and lake tips on how to give a nicer moment to a native listening to me. That's really the thing I would like to be able to experiment more than anything else regarding foreign language acquisition. And giving IPA transcription of expected CS actual and possibly some links to video explaining each phonem that went wrong would be top notch.

Regarding engagement, after having try a bunch of online things, to my mind the best formula is to give insights on cultural and social matter: what are the regions of the country¹ and their specificities, what people love as food, drink, music, dance, literature, what have been the historical struggle of the linguistic community, who are the people prised in this community? Well at least for my profile it drives more interest than anything else.

¹ languages are not one to one bound to a single specific country of course, but you get the idea.

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.

Feedback: The tutor pronounces some obvious things wrong that contradicts the words. Two examples: 気滅の刃 - it pronounced 刃 wrong despite the furigana being correct. It also kept pronouncing は as "ha" even when used as topic particle in more complex sentences. Edit: also observed 使い方 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.

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.

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.

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.

Even some basic app that can pre-load the prompt doesn't seem to exist?

I’m going to assume this works better on the App.

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.

For me a key feature will be a family plan; Duolingo is great in that regard.

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.

(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.)

How widely have you tested your supported languages on native-speakers and learners?

The vocabulary tooling looks neat and well thought out.

I thought this interaction in Spanish was interesting:

I said something like: Yo pienso que tú 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 tú, como si fuera un robot

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!

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.

When I babble (as someone at my level does) and say "eh... a bit of sentence eh... a bit more of sentence" half the times it cuts me off in the first eh... or the second one. This is extremely frustrating, in fact I didn't even finish the free 20 minutes trial because of this.

Another issue is that like all LLMs it's bad at maintaining context of a conversation. I tried speaking about cars with it, as it's a topic I like so I thought it'd be cool and all of a sudden it's asking me what's my favourite ice cream. Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% certain I said something about ice cream but any human would understand I didn't want to say that.

Also I tried it with Spanish as I'm a native speaker. The speech recognition is bad, I don't know what sort of processing this does but it has a lot of mistakes, however it's very rare that chatGPT ever fails to transcript. I'd say well over 20% of sentences were misunderstood.

The idea is cool, but I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who wants to learn Spanish.

I think it needs push-to-talk mode, because it's picking up every surrounding noise.

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.

The text generation and speed of speech also seems painfully slow at this time.

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?

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.

Q: how do I change my name in the app?

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.

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 ça 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.

"Error An unknown error has occurred."

has this been tested on Safari?

That person will have a hellish time marketing it because projects like this will have so thoroughly primed us to assume its slop.

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?

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.

- 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".