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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

#111

Post by XFrequentist »

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…

I'm a native English speaker, but I'd love something like this for French, Spanish, or Mandarin! Any good products you're aware of?

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

#112

Post by kboom »

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…

One of my coworker and good friend literally named NPCs in the game we were developing together at work after my pronunciation mistakes: kunter (counter strike), eevol, etc. In French we have an 'ee' sound you dont even have in english, it's much more 'ee' than ee. Took me years to hear the difference. Pretty sure it is one of the hardest spot for a french: beach, snitch, sheep, cheat, etc. And none of those sound like an i in french (e.g frite).

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

#113

Post by fnfilho »

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…

Amazing product!

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

#114

Post by ilyausorov »

ggregoire wrote: post #108
Zababa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a very nice idea! I'm French and not confident at all in my oral English because of my pronunciation. I did a bit of job hunting recently, and I was afraid that the topic of English would come up precisely because of that.

Hey we are in the same boat, like many French people I guess! I’m confident speaking English but it feels so frustrating sometimes to not be understood by my interlocutors. Especially by other non native English speakers who usually have a hard time understanding my accent. I’m definitely going to check this product out, I always wanted something like it.

We're here for you! If you have any feedback, questions or issues, please reach out to us at founders@boldvoice.com! We're constantly working on improving the app and adding more engaging content.

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

#115

Post by usmannk »

kboom wrote: post #112
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…

One of my coworker and good friend literally named NPCs in the game we were developing together at work after my pronunciation mistakes: kunter ( counter strike), eevol, etc. In French we have an 'ee' sound you dont even have in english, it's much more 'ee' than ee . Took me years to hear the difference. Pretty sure it is one of the hardest spot for a french: beach, snitch, sheep, cheat, etc. And none of those sound…

Snitch doesn't sound like beach, sheep, cheat. I'm not sure how to approximate snitch in French, maybe you can't. The Google card that comes up if you search "snitch pronunciation" is right though.

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

#116

Post by nirali35 »

brunovcosta wrote: post #94
nirali35 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks amazing! Curious to know what stack you are using to build the frontend. I am starting to build a video editor, so just curious if any framework (React, Vue) or library were especially useful?

Thank you! We are using Vue+Typescript for the frontend and Haskell & Node for the backend microservices. For your case (and maybe for us in the future), I would take a look at rust+webasm or using WebGL directly

Thanks, currently I am also using Vue and doing simple DOM manipulations.

Any specific Vue libraries you found useful for drag-n-drop, alignments, connecting arrows, etc?

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

#117

Post by brunovcosta »

mwcampbell wrote: post #105
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…

Congrats on the launch. Have you tested the generated UI for accessibility, particularly with a screen reader? If I can try a finished demo app without going through the design process myself, I'd be happy to provide feedback.

Yes! We have a customer which have blind users. So we are prepared for this!

Here is a quick demo: https://accessibility-demo.abstra.app/

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

#118

Post by mwcampbell »

brunovcosta wrote: post #117
mwcampbell wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats on the launch. Have you tested the generated UI for accessibility, particularly with a screen reader? If I can try a finished demo app without going through the design process myself, I'd be happy to provide feedback.

Yes! We have a customer which have blind users. So we are prepared for this! Here is a quick demo: https://accessibility-demo.abstra.app/

Not bad! The only slight problem I noticed is that NVDA (a popular open-source screen reader for Windows) announced that the plain text above the edit box was clickable.

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

#119

Post by brunovcosta »

nirali35 wrote: post #116
brunovcosta wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! We are using Vue+Typescript for the frontend and Haskell & Node for the backend microservices. For your case (and maybe for us in the future), I would take a look at rust+webasm or using WebGL directly

Thanks, currently I am also using Vue and doing simple DOM manipulations. Any specific Vue libraries you found useful for drag-n-drop, alignments, connecting arrows, etc?

We saw limitations on all libs we tried, so we decided to implement drag-n-drop by ourselves using setIntervals, getBoundingRects and absolute positions for arrows and other visual elements

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

#120

Post by nextaccountic »

anadalakra wrote: post #110
yorwba wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's an interesting use case that we could potentially explore down the line, thanks for sharing! Right now, we're focusing on non-native English speakers, as it's a problem that we personally understand best -- as well as a very large market.

I just want to note that for many deaf people (including practically all people that were born deaf) sign language is their first language, and thus, technically, English isn't their native language.

edit: I'm also curious to know more about what kinds of analysis/algorithms you do to detect the accent, if you can share a little bit. Can your app distinguish between different American accents? Or could it hear the user talking in African-American English and assume it is "incorrect"?

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