Tried it is Safari, frustrating, confusing, spent some time figuring it out and closed the tab. I didn't say anything but the app kept "recognizing" some random words and "answering" tutor's questions... looks like pre-alpha version.
Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
161–170 of 282 posts
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#162Also I noticed your app doesn't work without a network connection, so i'm assuming you're doing all the TTS and STT server-side. Curious how practical that is w/r/t latency? Any plans to doing it all on-phone?
(probably a more fringe request, but i'm asking because I do all my language learning on the commuter trains w/o a good connection.)
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not finish, publish it to the store and get income if it was that straightforward? There's a long way to go between a toy application to demonstrate a product, and something on shelves actually selling. In other words, you can most often quickly tackle the concept or trivial parts of an app, but it's much harder to get a real product out, even if the implementation looks straightforward on surface.
This is like the story of the businessman and the fisherman. Why on earth are you going to build out a whole product: doing marketing, security, incorporation, customer support, etc… just so you can finally arrive at the end result of… teaching yourself a language? The toy app is 100% of the value. You don’t need all that other shit, you just need a really good prompt. It’s exactly how you don’t need to search websit…
you think a chat UI is the apex UX? Most of us don't agree with that. On top of that, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini apps all sucks.
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#164I had a go and it failed at the first hurdle I’m afraid. It was hallucinating my responses and inserting phrases that I wasn’t saying. The teacher kept switching into an American accent when I was trying to learn French and the responses were getting very slow bitty. Hopefully this is just an initial load of issues because the concept is great.
Yes, this is weird. I said something like "I want to learn Spanisch to go shopping" and it just added "That's great" to my sentence.
Also for the flash cards the audio that says the word starts at the same time with the audio for the example sentence.
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#165Congrats on your app and love it so far! Already sent it to over a dozen family members. Curious about a couple of things - I see only two employees on LinkedIn -- how were you able to QA all these different languages with just two people?! - I tried Urdu and the app did quite well. But curious why you have two female voices and not any male voice? - I realize Sesame is a much bigger team, but curious what you think…
Thank you so much for that!
We focused on testing and tweaking the most popular ones, we have not tested some of the niche ones. We have removed languages that users have told us have major issues, but there are still some left.
The voices are due to the quality of the TTS services that we use. Openi, 11labs, minimax. Some services don't have many or even 1 good voice. We will add more over time
Sesame also passes in the users voice into the TTS model so that it can vibe well with the users tone and mood, whereas we are just using raw TTS. Their latency is also very low, but this is not quite suitable for language learning.
In the future we hope to move to full voice to voice models, once those become mature and intelligent enough.
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#166Also I noticed your app doesn't work without a network connection, so i'm assuming you're doing all the TTS and STT server-side. Curious how practical that is w/r/t latency? Any plans to doing it all on-phone? (probably a more fringe request, but i'm asking because I do all my language learning on the commuter trains w/o a good connection.)
Exactly, it's all server side. There are no plans for this. The main issue I see with doing it in device is the LLM piece. Even with some large models like llama 4 maverick, the tutor just struggles to properly teach and understand the student, it's not viable IMO.
Intelligence is super key here, especially as the context size gets larger (due to memory) and intelligence degrades.
Another major issue is TTS voice quality, but this seems to be improving a lot for small local models.
EDIT: You're right, latency is also a big deal. You need to get each piece under a second, and the LLM part would be especially slow on mobile devices.
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#167Honestly tried it out, I wanted to like it but in its current form I found myself frustrated enough to just end the 'call' and close the app. Been learning Spanish for quite some time now so wasn't put off by the 'it always talks in X language' thing people are talking about. The thing that put me off was the speech recognition. I am not in a loud environment and I wasn't even talking and it was picking up responses…
Me too. Complete silence, headphones but recognized random words before I had a chance to say anything.
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#168I'm trying to learn vietnamese, but the lessons are really really rough and borderline bad advice. --- AI: Anh mệt is good if bạn are a man speaking about yourself. You can also say, “Em mệt” if you’re a woman. this isn't correct. If you are of "older brother" age and are male, you say Anh. Em is for if you are "younger person" (does not matter the gender). Women tend to prefer being called "em" (even if they are old…
Hey, it’s great to see other people learn Vietnamese! And your feedback is on point. I’m still at the beginning and just built a tool to help me learn basic phrases. I will very much appreciate the feedback! https://envn.app
I haven't figured out what works for me yet when learning Vietnamese, so I'm not really sure yet was advice to give.
Trying out your tool, I'd really like to know if the sound is north or southern Vietnamese. I think your tool is southern vietnamese, but idk.. I personally prefer learning southern, but all the AI TTS tools use the north dialect. Ideally, I'd like a 'pure' southern accent and not a hybrid.
For your tool, You might want to get into the way to address people (Anh, em, ba, co, etc). You seem to just use toi (which I hear vietnamese people using with each other too...) but my understanding is the (Anh/Em/Ba/etc) are more 'intimate' whereas toi is more formal/business like?
One idea I haven't tried too much of yet is making flash cards that teach me a sentence structure, but introduce new vocabulary. Learning a diaspora of phrases works for short 2-3 word ones, but when I try to learn more complex sentences, my brain isn't able to draw the patterns as nothing is connected.
For example, trying to learn "bạn tên là gì" and "nhà vệ sinh ở đâu" (from your website) is harder than learning "Bạn tên là gì?", "Bạn nghề là gì?", "Bạn số điện thoại là gì?"
The other huge challenge I have is feeling like I am making progress. I'm definitely getting better, but its pretty disheartening to study for 40+ hours and still can't pronounce words like Can Tho properly, despite knowing how to read and write.
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My email is in my profile. Feel free to reach out to me if you have more updates or want to bounce ideas.
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#169For me this is great for practice (I tried Russian). However the big missing piece for all these language learning apps is the lack of support for spotting and correcting errors in your pronunciation - as long as you say the word more or less right, the transcription gives you a pass. I am very excited for the whole STT/TTS to go away and for us to have models that really "hear" exactly what you said. Sometimes this…
The persuasion lesson sounds like a great idea, we haven't thought of that. Yeah voice to voice models will be amazing. There is significant progress from openai/gemini, and we plan to use them when they are ready.
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#170Haven'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.
Academically, maybe it doesn't have a flag. But the de facto flag is the Senyera and I don't think a lot of people wouldn't recognize it as such in Spain.