Speak's AI Language Learning App

Global connectivity has become increasingly vital in our modern age, with people from distinct countries and cultures communicating with each other every day, whether in the context of growing their business globally or simply socializing and meeting new people through social media.

This makes learning new languages all the more important, but according to Preply, an organization that surveyed 1,000 Americans in regard to foreign language learning, there is a lack of emphasis and focus on the matter.

31% of Americans only learned another language because of a school mandate, with 50% of them having no interest in learning a second language as they believe most people only speak English anyway, and 12% perceiving most other languages as unuseful in real life. 71% of these respondents regret their decision not to learn a second language, however, with some finding the pursuit too difficult or too boring at the time, and 21% of them not having the opportunity to practice it.

Speak, an OpenAI-backed startup founded by Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu, creates an AI-powered language learning app to provide those eager to learn new languages with a handy and personalized resource.

Started From the Bottom

Speak is far from being the only language learning app out there, with juggernauts like Duolingo, Memrise, and Rosetta Stone dominating the US market. The startup hasn’t let its lack of seniority bring it down, though, as it puts immense trust in the app’s AI-powered capabilities and features.

Speak started out in South Korea as an English learning platform, with users able to converse and have open-ended conversations in English with an AI tutor. Users can discuss a range of topics with the AI tutor, with it giving feedback on a user’s pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary when or if needed.

According to the startup, Speak became one of the top downloaded education apps in South Korea, with over 100,000 subscribers. It is said that the app helped about 3 million people, which is equivalent to almost 6% of South Korea’s population, to learn English.

OpenAI Partnership

As an OpenAI Startup Fund portfolio company, Speak has not only received financing from the startup investment fund but also access to OpenAI systems. Due to this, Speak has been able to build its AI tutor on top of OpenAI’s GPT-4, giving its app more advanced features and capabilities, all powered by AI.

Speak utilizes GPT-4 so the app’s AI tutor can provide more personalized and contextual feedback to users. By integrating the large multimodal model into its system, the Speak app can create a learning experience that is more accurate, coherent, and natural without the need for an actual live tutor on the other end. According to Zwick, this development has increased user engagement and created better learning outcomes for users.

Aside from GPT-4, Speak has also utilized OpenAI’s Whisper API, enabling multilingual speech recognition. Speak and OpenAI have also collaborated on new plugins for ChatGPT, giving users of the LLM access to Speak’s language tutoring experience.

Though Speak competitor Duolingo was also a launch partner for GPT-4 and is undoubtedly dominating the language learning market at the moment, Speak’s human-level and far-from-premium pricing service may give the startup a significant competitive advantage.

Now We’re Here

All of the developments that have happened due to Speak’s and OpenAI’s partnership gave the startup the opportunity to further expand its app’s abilities and coverage. Speak is currently live in 20 countries, including but not limited to Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Brazil, and Mexico, and is now able to teach users other languages like Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Japanese.

Speak recently announced a series B-2 funding round that resulted in $16M, led by angel investor Lachy Groom, with Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as participants.

With a total of $63M raised by Speak over the years as well as the startup’s mission to give learners around the world the ability to commit to low-cost language education, Speak aims to launch its apps in more markets, including the US, by the end of the year.

Meme & AI-Generated Picture

Job Posting

• Speak - Senior Full-stack Engineer - San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)

• Speak - Applied ML Engineer, Speech and Language - San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)

• Speak - Senior Backend Engineer, ML Systems - San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)

• Speak - Senior Product Designer - San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)

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