There are many resources for learning English, but not so many for near-native speakers who wish to improve their language skills. This description matches Stan Beliaev and Yurii Rebryk, and that’s what inspired them to Fluently.
Using AI, Fluently acts as a coach, giving users feedback and tips about their spoken English. This makes it much like ELSA and its AI language tutor, in addition to online and offline one-on-one coaching solutions, except that Fluently builds its feedback by listening in on calls.
Users can have Fluently record and transcribe their side of real-life calls, corresponding to when using Zoom for work, but there's also the choice to practice with an AI coach – either “Ryan” for on a regular basis small talk or “Kyle” for simulated interviews, which are sometimes a priority for foreign applicants seeking to land a job that requires advanced English skills, which is becoming more common.
While keeping themselves busy, the duo estimates that there are 84 million non-native English speakers working in English-speaking environments. It's hard to say how lots of them would really like to be more easily understood, but it surely's arguably a sufficiently big area of interest, a growing one, and a much less crowded area than ESL overall.
This potential market has helped Fluently within the Y Combinator Winter Course 2024and before the Demo Day a seed round of two million US dollars with participation from Pioneer Fund, SID Venture Partnersand individual angels.
It also hasn't hurt that Fluently relies heavily on the technical side of education technology. Of the distributed team of 4, three are engineers, Rebryk told TechCrunch. With a shared background in machine learning, he and his former college roommate have the form of track record that wows VCs as of late, with internships at Amazon, Google and Nvidia.
It could also be surprising that none of them are teachers, let alone education experts. But developing a product that they themselves need gives them a bonus. For example, they know that people who find themselves already fairly fluent usually tend to be all for an answer that will be utilized in the background, drawing their attention only to the issues that have to be addressed.
Another point is that Fluently desires to be a one-stop shop for higher speaking skills. Rather than accent, it focuses on intelligibility, and that features improving pronunciation, grammar and speaking speed, in addition to expanding vocabulary. Rephrasing advice, corresponding to that offered by Grammarly or Ludwig for writing, could possibly be one other addition, said Rebryk.
In its current beta version, Fluently is clearly still in its infancy and isn’t resistant to crashes. But for users who don't mind giving up their bank card details to check out the free trial, it already gives a transparent idea of what it could do. For example, your humble servant has learned to pronounce “computer” higher, which will be very useful for those who work in tech. For some, at the very least, that is likely to be definitely worth the $25 per thirty days Fluently desires to charge.
There's one other side Fluently could take from Duolingo in terms of helping users correct their mistakes and track their progress in a fun way. This is normally key to helping people persist with their goals, and motivation to learn a language tends to undergo ups and downs. But moderately than encourage learning overall, Fluently wants to make use of the technology to deal with the particular difficulties of a user who desires to go from near-fluent to full proficiency.
One issue with personalization will be privacy, especially with an app that runs within the background and has microphone access. That's why Fluently insists on telling users during onboarding that their privacy is guaranteed, as audio is stored locally, encrypted, and data is shielded from third-party vendors. On the latter, the startup points out that “data sent to third-party AI vendors for transcription is anonymized and never used for training.”
Some of this has been made possible by the recent release of Apple Silicon, Rebryk said. This is expounded to a different limitation of the beta: It is just available on MacOS. However, Fluently is already constructing a waitlist of users who will probably be notified when the Chrome extension is prepared.
With that in mind, the seed round will help Fluently hire one other team member and have money for marketing when the time is correct, Rebryk said. “When you may have a small team, you prioritize what to do first,” he said, smiling.
