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Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

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Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

#121

Post by eghad »

yorwba wrote: post #93
anadalakra wrote: post #3

We’re Anada and Ilya, the co-founders of BoldVoice ( https://www.boldvoice.com/ ). BoldVoice is an accent coaching app that helps non-native speakers learn and practice the standard American accent. As immigrants to the US, we’ve personally experienced that having a foreign accent can affect your confidence and job opportunities (by as much as 20%, according to studies). So we built this app to help non-native Englis…

Have you considered adapting your app for deaf people? A friend of mine developed a pronunciation practice app for deaf speakers of Korean as a student, which won them an innovation award. But according to my friend, the pronunciation score (which was based on comparing spectrograms or something) didn't work all that well, and the award was mostly due to the non-technical team members making up a heart-warming story…

The problem with adapting this to other forms of atypical speech is that their recommendation system likely relies on a catalog the phonemes L2 speakers have issues with (the example most people know is the Japanese "L" "R" swap) so it's much easier to create courses with specific focuses and solutions.

If Google's Project Euphonia [0] is actually still ongoing and they release their dataset/methodology of training models with that sparse dataset I can see your idea as approachable; even accented speech is a tough problem to work on considering how many variants exist worldwide (but their approach looks good!).

[0] https://sites.research.google/euphonia/about/

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

#122

Post by alsdtj »

Sriverop wrote: post #2

Hi, we are Salvador and Max from Levo ( https://www.levo.mx ) a high yield savings account for Mexico. We aggregate the savings accounts of our users and negotiate significantly better interest rates from other banks on their behalf. 65% of Mexican savers keep their savings in their checking or savings accounts, yet 97% of all bank accounts are non-interest bearing. This is partly due to a highly concentrated banking…

Growing up in Mexico and now working in the financial service industry in the US, I’ve seen how many of Mexico’s residents are under banked or unbanked. I think this is an important issue you are trying to solve for! Is there a direct link I can share with family/friends in Mexico to participate in the private beta?

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

#123

Post by eghad »

anadalakra wrote: post #3

We’re Anada and Ilya, the co-founders of BoldVoice ( https://www.boldvoice.com/ ). BoldVoice is an accent coaching app that helps non-native speakers learn and practice the standard American accent. As immigrants to the US, we’ve personally experienced that having a foreign accent can affect your confidence and job opportunities (by as much as 20%, according to studies). So we built this app to help non-native Englis…

Congrats on the launch! Worked on something similar, so rooting for ya. Using Hollywood accent coaches is a great approach, but I'd also look into identifying speech therapists that specialize with helping adults in target regions to 1) get more information for your models and 2) point out which problems can't be corrected in older adults, so you focus on those that can.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

#124

Post by powerlogic31 »

brunovcosta wrote: post #6

I'm Bruno, founder of Abstra ( https://abstra.app/ ). Abstra is a no-code tool that allows designers to build web apps. Imagine Figma, but we export a functional web application. Here's a timelapsed demo showing it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fObVcHcd_w . As opposed to most famous no-code tools, we don't do any nested-based editing (e.g. tree structure like Webflow - which is an amazing tool, but is b…

Great work. I'm not a power user of figma but I've dabbled with it. I think abstra controls for connecting backend is great. the front is a bit hard to use for me. I wish it was more canvaish than figmaish. The contrast for the buttons could be better, why is the box color smaller than the shadow color in the properties?, also why i cant find the width and height properties so i can put it manually. just some feedback. thanks for all your hard work.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

#125

Post by quickthrower2 »

Sriverop wrote: post #2

Hi, we are Salvador and Max from Levo ( https://www.levo.mx ) a high yield savings account for Mexico. We aggregate the savings accounts of our users and negotiate significantly better interest rates from other banks on their behalf. 65% of Mexican savers keep their savings in their checking or savings accounts, yet 97% of all bank accounts are non-interest bearing. This is partly due to a highly concentrated banking…

How does this compare to the end user with holding USD? I guess you'd get hardly any interest in USD, but at the same time much less inflation.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

#126

Post by dumbfoundded »

IceDane wrote: post #88
dumbfoundded wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For ease of numbers, let's say you make $100/week and have to spend $90/week on personal expenses. If you get paid once every 2 weeks, you have: Week 1: -$90 Week 2: +$20 Week 3: -$70 Week 4: +$40 Week 5: -$50 Week 6: +$60 Week 7: -$30 Week 8: +$80 Week 9: -$10 Week 10: +$100 So it takes you 9 weeks before you never go negative and to be able to afford to take the job, you need $90. If you get paid everyday, it's: We…

Yes, you're absolutely right. If we set up a perfect example to support your arguments, and we ignore any possible negative aspects, then we can conclude that this is a purely beneficial arrangement. Look, I'm not arguing that it can't be useful to have the ability to get paid daily sometimes, but I don't buy into this schtick about this company doing this in some attempt to help the poor, because literally the oppos…

I think your last point makes your true beliefs clear. You believe it's better for the poor to have a forced savings account (or as I call it a loan to the employer) so that they can't "make bad financial decisions". It's extremely paternalistic to believe the poor shouldn't have immediate access to all of the money they've earned or at least a choice of when to do so.

Of course there should be legal limits as to what interest rate can be charged. I don't believe anything more than 10% on an annualized basis can be justified.

In any case, the vast majority of your points in this discussion are irrelevant and the most potent point you make seems to depend on either interest rates not be fair or the poor being too irresponsible to get their deserved cash.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

#127

Post by gumby »

anadalakra wrote: post #3

We’re Anada and Ilya, the co-founders of BoldVoice ( https://www.boldvoice.com/ ). BoldVoice is an accent coaching app that helps non-native speakers learn and practice the standard American accent. As immigrants to the US, we’ve personally experienced that having a foreign accent can affect your confidence and job opportunities (by as much as 20%, according to studies). So we built this app to help non-native Englis…

When you succeed I hope you expand to other English accents, e.g. Australia, NZ, England…

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

#128

Post by stevekemp »

LukeEF wrote: post #48
anadalakra wrote: post #3

We’re Anada and Ilya, the co-founders of BoldVoice ( https://www.boldvoice.com/ ). BoldVoice is an accent coaching app that helps non-native speakers learn and practice the standard American accent. As immigrants to the US, we’ve personally experienced that having a foreign accent can affect your confidence and job opportunities (by as much as 20%, according to studies). So we built this app to help non-native Englis…

This is a native english speaker: https://youtu.be/pit0OkNp7s8 We are a diverse bunch

My wife moved from Finland, and ended up working in A&E in Dundee. She had a rough time at first understanding some of the heavier Scottish accents.

I have tested her now, on Rab C Nesbitt, and she passes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qeWbC7XtO0

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

#129

Post by taurath »

alexvilhena wrote: post #5

Hi - we’re Alex, Thiago, and Marcel, founders of Plug ( https://www.plugpagamentos.com/ ). We are live in Brazil, and currently onboarding our first beta customers in the US and LatAm. Plug is an API to manage multiple payments providers. Through a single integration, businesses can connect to multiple providers and route transactions between them. It’s hard to know who the right payments provider for your business i…

Definitely a market need for this, having built one of those layers myself.

Are you planning to support saved payment methods across multiple providers? Thats always seemed like the touchiest area for me, especially since it would seemingly invalidate a lot of the fraud protection that payment providers use to keep lock-in.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7

#130

Post by anix »

alexvilhena wrote: post #5

Hi - we’re Alex, Thiago, and Marcel, founders of Plug ( https://www.plugpagamentos.com/ ). We are live in Brazil, and currently onboarding our first beta customers in the US and LatAm. Plug is an API to manage multiple payments providers. Through a single integration, businesses can connect to multiple providers and route transactions between them. It’s hard to know who the right payments provider for your business i…

How are you folks positioning this differently than day PaymentsOS?
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