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

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

#261

Post by adastra22 »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #251
adastra22 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a whitelist? I might just be interested in only having certain sites, like this one or Reddit, translated into my target language. That way I can be certain it is only turned on for sites that I am OK with sharing browsing history and not be concerned that I might have missed adding something to the blacklist.

That's a good point. At some point I ought to make a UBlock-origin style list of customisable rules. At the moment I'm focused on translation quality, but I intend to add that.

Thanks!

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

#262

Post by Velorivox »

55555 wrote: post #68
mariano54 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah we need to improve the beginner experience, it's more tailored towards intermediate/advanced students at the moment.

I'm an advanced learner but I stopped after a few moments because it's boring. It's asking me questions that you'd ask a beginner (although a beginner wouldn't understand the questions). It just asked what food I like to eat, where I like to travel, whether I like the weather, etc. I have a language tutor IRL and I have found that we run out of things to talk about too. So we often find ourselves just discussing the…

I'm not sure that would solve the problem. Ultimately this (and speaking with LLMs in general) feels a lot like filling in an adaptive form rather than talking to a human being. The LLM, for example, is never going to go on and tell you some anecdote from its life (and if it were prompted to do so it would come across as quite insincere). It's not going to say, "Oh that neighborhood is not safe," when you tell it about where you'll live when studying abroad. It's not going to recommend supplementary material (or worse, it will...with broken links that never existed).

I'm not even sure this helps with speaking practice since it's just a test of whether what you said can be transcribed by Whisper, which is not at all a test of correct pronunciation. I just tried it with the most horrid, butchered accent I could muster, and it still worked...if I practiced for months on end like that, I'd end up in a very difficult place as a language learner.

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

#264

Post by mariano54 »

TeeMassive wrote: post #181

Very interesting, but 20 minutes seems very low to fully try a language learning app. would you consider extending to a few hours?

I'm sorry but we are not providing longer free trials at the moment. You can clear the cache to try again (but you will have to go through the onboarding).

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

#266

Post by scopendo »

mpeg wrote: post #183
carstenhag wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if I got you, are you aware of the cultural/political issues around it? There's no flag for the language (as it's used at many places), but almost everyone will be happy with a commonly known flag they can identify with. A Valencian will be fine with a Catalunya flag :)

The cultural/political issues are deeper than you'd think, there are some within Catalonia that would claim all of us Catalan speakers as part of the same cultural umbrella, negating our own cultural background as derivative. That's why I say that I personally (as a Mallorcan) would much prefer the language to be associated with a Spanish flag than a Catalan flag. Some people would agree and some would disagree – ult…

Yep. Really dislike the American flag being used as the symbol for English.

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

#267

Post by csa »

55555 wrote: post #70
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.

Unfortunately, I think you will soon learn that the market for advanced language learners is 1/500th the size of the market for beginner learners. But thank you very much and please keep focusing on us.

Indeed.

I’m one of those 1/500 in multiple languages, and I love resources like these.

That said, if they want to make money, the beginner / false beginner market is huge.

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

#268

Post by owebmaster »

deadbabe wrote: post #256
owebmaster wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will still bet that great apps with much better UX than your average vibecoder will still continue to make people rich.

UX won’t make you rich anymore in a world where people want their own custom versions of apps.

well someone just did it in 6 months: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/6-month-old-solo-owned-vib...

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

#269

Post by owebmaster »

TypingOutBugs wrote: post #225
owebmaster wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting the pieces together is easy and letting someone talk to an AI is not a particularly difficult problem Exactly! Not difficult, right? Making and selling a product out of it is called marketing. It is not rocket science, but many engineers can't grasp it. GPT Wrappers are the new CRUD. There is no innovation in Trello, Jira and any other SaaS, they are just marketed products that thousands of people here in H…

Be honest though, what’s the difference between this and a good system prompt in Claude to be a language tutor? I worked for an Edtech startup before that had a novel approach to mastery (as opposed to Anki) and it’s not something you can put in a prompt.

a prompt doesn't market itself. The difference is small but one person can sell the wrapper but can't sell the Claude as language tutor. People will hustle.

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

#270

Post by VerminOctopus1 »

I tried using this to learn some basics of Mandarin Chinese. It was frankly a disastrous UX. I have no idea how to begin a useful lesson, the AI just started talking at me in full on Mandarin and asked me questions in Mandarin. How am I supposed to engage with this as a complete beginner?

The text generation and speed of speech also seems painfully slow at this time.

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