This startup wants to help people start learning to speak a new language without knowing any word
- Interactive language teaching is the closest way to a natural language learning process; while current offerings in the market normally require an experienced tutor to lead the process
- This new AI-powered app helps beginners to start learning to speak a new language without a professional tutor on the other side
Picking up a new language in an immersive environment via hearing, mimicking, and repeating has been the most natural way of language learning for human beings. With the rise of the internet, a lot of interactive base language learning tools and programs have been developed; but most of those programs requires a professional tutor as a partner to guide the conversation. The tutor would need to be able to guide through and extend the conversation, also be able to communicate with the tutee. But it’s expensive to get a professional tutor, and the time difference is another limit, says to recruit more tutors from the U.S. to teach English learners in Asia.
Language Hero, a startup focusing on language learning solution app for institution or enterprise, tackles this challenge by providing an extensive library of pre-translated content selections and a branching script system that enable students to have real-life video chat conversations with each other or with tutors by choosing, hearing, speaking and repeating the sentences. Even the students could practice with each other by listening and repeating the recorded sample.
What’s more, through its proprietary chat engine built on Markov Chain, a technology commonly used in AI chatbot, the conversation would be guided and expanded in real life scenario with options popped up on the screen like a visual-based cloze. For example, in the topic of food, the session might start with one user asking “what kind of food do you like,” then transmitted into “I like _____ cuisine”, where the image of a few different food types (like Italian, Singaporean, etc) would be shown on the screen for users to tap, and either the tutor or the app would read out the whole sentence for the learners to mimic and follow.
Through the differentiator, Language Hero wants to focus on education institution for kids and for adults. Own content integration in the app would be the upcoming features for its clients. Language Hero would compile the content into a meaningful and expandable conversation for language learning purposes.
At this moment Language Hero has completed the Beta test and is working with a few educational institutions in Taiwan for pilot. It is actively looking for academic partners, business users and potential investors to scale up the language learning business. If you’d be in Singapore during 6/27–6/28, you could meet with the team in Innovfest Unbound in Singapore on 6/27–28, 2019 at booth number P11, Taiwan Tech Arena.
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The author, Rich Fuh, TTA partnership director.
