Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor • Hacker News Board

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#121

Post by carstenhag » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

Haven't tested the functionality yet, but some feedback:

- 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".

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#122

Post by konovalov-nk » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 6:56 PM UTC

leonidasv wrote: post #98

Question: ChatGPT voice mode seems to have too much tolerance for mispronouncing. Sometimes, it understands you even you mispronounce something in a phrase, and it's not aware enough to correct you - it even says your pronunciation is correct if asked. It's good at grammar, though. 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…

In general there aren't really models that can understand nuances of your speech yet. Gemini 2.5 voice mode changed that only recently and I think it can understand emotions but I'm not sure if it can detect things like accent and mispronouncing. The problem is data, we need a large corpus of data labeled how exactly the audio sample is mispronouncing the word, so the model can cluster those. Maybe self-learning techniques without human feedback can do it somehow. Other than that I'm not seeing how this is even possible to train such model with what's currently available.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#123

Post by brcmthrowaway » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 6:56 PM UTC

dataviz1000 wrote: post #10

Luis von Ahn spoke in the early 2010s—probably around 2014—at The LAB in Wynwood, Miami. He recounted how his fascination with crowd-sourcing led first to reCAPTCHA and then to his latest venture, Duolingo. He made it clear that his real passion wasn’t language per se, but building a crowd-sourced human translation service as a business model. At that point, Duolingo had roughly 24 employees—and, much to his surprise…

Coursera is failing because its platforms are infested with Big tech cert slop.

And mid 2010s view was MOOCs were supposed to disrupt University education!

Add it to the pile.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#124

Post by itake » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 6:59 PM UTC

Velorivox wrote: post #100

tempodox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds very much like the kinds of mistakes that LLMs typically make. It's a pity, I would love a good language learning platform.

A fundamental problem with language learning built around an LLM is that the one thing you can guarantee is that no two people will have a consistent experience, nor is there ever going to be a 100% freedom-from-error. That makes it very hard to predict and therefore market what or how people will learn. I think this company will end up pivoting into a B2B context before long. Hopefully they will still stick to the m…

The trend I've seen in these AI tech companies is they launch their MVP using base models (or in this case fine tuning gpt4). This gives them enough traction for a seed round, but 2+ years later, they don't have the talent to actually improve the product beyond this.

If OpenAI puts resources to language learning, they could build a great product. But 3rd party devs relying on someone's tech hasn't proven to be a good strategy.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#125

Post by npinsker » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

carstenhag wrote: post #121

Haven't tested the functionality yet, but some feedback: - 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 te…

The English intro feels non-native too, and does have a typo (“You’ll be truly amazed of how polished […]”), which makes me think it wasn’t AI.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#126

Post by mpeg » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 7:10 PM UTC

carstenhag wrote: post #121

Haven't tested the functionality yet, but some feedback: - 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 te…

Catalan, the language, does not have a flag. As a native speaker (of a dialect) who is not from Catalonia I would much rather the language be represented by the Spanish national flag. Although people from Andorra might also not love that.

Languages and flags don't mix well.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#127

Post by deanc » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 7:11 PM UTC

haiku2077 wrote: post #106

deanc wrote: post #79

I built a basic version of this for myself with a prompt in chat gpt in an afternoon. It's great that you've built this yourself, but where's the magic? If it's your prompt it can probably be extracted in a few minutes by those who know how to do so.

[flagged]

I knew this would be a reply. Dropbox was magical and just worked and took a huge amount of pain points away from a complicated protocol. Building an LLM wrapper doesn't make a product in 2025.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#128

Post by npinsker » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 7:14 PM UTC

iandanforth wrote: post #117

antonaf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I can understand and empathize with your experience. Quite honestly our current focus is more for B1+ students. That 0 -> 1 / bootstrapping of the language is much better served by traditional material that is less talking / listening-heavy.

This is demonstrably false. Natural language acquisition is almost entirely listening and talking. The fastest and most consistently effective way to learn a language is immersion. The reason traditional material doesn't attempt immersive techniques is because it is much much easier to print a static book than it is to produce interactive and adaptive content. The promise and potential of LLM based language learning…

Your comment sparked an idea of a conversation with an agent where at any time you could ask, “what’s this word?” and it would respond with an image explaining it. I’m surprised there don't seem to be voice apps that integrate any visual content.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#129

Post by QuadmasterXLII » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 7:18 PM UTC

Someday someone will release a good AI based language learning app, because it’s the obvious use of the technology.

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

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#130

Post by andy_ppp » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

Hey! Can you add a feature that can record my lessons with a real human and then build a way for me to practice all the things we covered in the lesson? Would pay for this feature if it worked well!