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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

#41

Post by ilyausorov »

eldaisfish wrote: post #33
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 disagree fundamentally with the premise here. An accent is simply someone applying the rules of pronunciation from one language to another. No accent is right or wrong but your product seems to imply that North American accents are desirable or correct while accents rooted in non-english languages are less desirable. Instead of trying to "acquire an accent" why not focus on clarity of speech and pronunciation? If s…

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I invite you to watch one of our dialect coaches, Ron Carlos, share a bit about both the values and process that he brings to the table at BoldVoice (1:43 mins) - https://vimeo.com/572809188

As our name implies, we want to help non-native English speakers feel bolder and more confident when speaking English. To feel more confident, indeed, one may need to more deeply learn the rules of English grammar, and more varied vocabulary.

However, in the pursuit of more confident and clear speech, one may also want to learn how to adapt their pronunciation, how they place stress, how they use intonation and they way they use pacing and rhythm. All of these are the component parts of an accent.

A note from Ron (who just Slacked me while I was writing this): Clarity of speech and pronunciation are big parts of an accent. You can’t change those without changing an accent. We are dialect coaches. We love peoples’ native accents, which is why we use sounds and samples from each speaker’s familiar language to teach sounds in American English. We want to empower our users to be able to control their speech so they can choose when sound more American in situations where it may benefit them. We truly hope that one day accents won’t matter, but until then, we have folks who feel embarrassed about their accent which keeps them from showing up with their full selves. We’re here to help those folks feel more confident with their speech.

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

#42

Post by ilyausorov »

mattzito wrote: post #39
geofft wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "liquid U" you mean pronouncing /ju/, then no, GAE pronounces it "redooce" and "stoodent", not "redyooce" and "styoodent." From the article: > yod-dropping after alveolar consonants (with new pronounced /nu/, not /nju/)

That's interesting - Speak with Distinction, which was treated like a bible of SAE when I was in school, leans on /ju/ for stressed syllables: https://books.google.com/books?id=hM-GDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT126&lpg=... not my area of expertise, but I had assumed from the article that SAE and GAE are equivalent, but maybe not?

Hey guys, for the record, in our description we used "Standard American accent" as a bit of a catch-all term, not quite in the most technical manner.

One of our dialect coaches, Ron Carlos, slacked me the following blurb: The accent taught in American theater schools (which we're calling SAE here, most would call it Mid-Atlantic) is an accent that was popular in Hollywood in the 40s. Many schools have modified it to sound more modern. And we definitely don’t use that accent in BoldVoice. Ours is more modern: for example, can’t and Cod will have two separate vowel sounds, and Tune and toon will sound the same.

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

#43

Post by villasv »

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…

> Then I realized that those abstractions (elastic springs) are easier to understand than the flexbox/grid/box model for UI layout.

I think so too! I enjoyed using Bootstrap precisely because my mind treated those auto-layout 12 columns as equally elastic springs, but this abstraction leaked very frequently.

Really cool to see such notion embedded into a layout builder.

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

#44

Post by mattzito »

ilyausorov wrote: post #42
mattzito wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting - Speak with Distinction, which was treated like a bible of SAE when I was in school, leans on /ju/ for stressed syllables: https://books.google.com/books?id=hM-GDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT126&lpg=... not my area of expertise, but I had assumed from the article that SAE and GAE are equivalent, but maybe not?

Hey guys, for the record, in our description we used "Standard American accent" as a bit of a catch-all term, not quite in the most technical manner. One of our dialect coaches, Ron Carlos, slacked me the following blurb: The accent taught in American theater schools (which we're calling SAE here, most would call it Mid-Atlantic) is an accent that was popular in Hollywood in the 40s. Many schools have modified it to…

Okay, that's helpful, thanks for going right to the source - yes, that's what I learned in theater school (referred to as SAE), and found that it was useless for everything except Shakespeare and poetry. I thought it pretty unlikely that was what you were going to teach non-native english speakers.

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

#45

Post by eldaisfish »

ilyausorov wrote: post #41
eldaisfish wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree fundamentally with the premise here. An accent is simply someone applying the rules of pronunciation from one language to another. No accent is right or wrong but your product seems to imply that North American accents are desirable or correct while accents rooted in non-english languages are less desirable. Instead of trying to "acquire an accent" why not focus on clarity of speech and pronunciation? If s…

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I invite you to watch one of our dialect coaches, Ron Carlos, share a bit about both the values and process that he brings to the table at BoldVoice (1:43 mins) - https://vimeo.com/572809188 As our name implies, we want to help non-native English speakers feel bolder and more confident when speaking English. To feel more confident, indeed, one may need to more deeply learn the rules…

You have not addressed the fundamental point of my comment - why are you selling a north american accent in particular?

Clear speech is not predicated on acquiring a certain accent and i feel you are feeding into the stereotype of an accent determining the quality of the speaker, not the content of speech.

Edit - you ignore the fact that a native speaker of English may have an accent that is not North American. Think about millions in the Indian subcontinent or Africa. Are you not being subtly racist in implying that only accents from North America are desirable? Personally, i find many African accents incredibly clear and easy to understand.

This is the reason for my opposition to "accent coaches" - they focus on the wrong thing - the accent. To anyone with half a brain, D Trump sounds incredibly stupid despite his north American accent.

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

#46

Post by argc »

eldaisfish wrote: post #45
ilyausorov wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I invite you to watch one of our dialect coaches, Ron Carlos, share a bit about both the values and process that he brings to the table at BoldVoice (1:43 mins) - https://vimeo.com/572809188 As our name implies, we want to help non-native English speakers feel bolder and more confident when speaking English. To feel more confident, indeed, one may need to more deeply learn the rules…

You have not addressed the fundamental point of my comment - why are you selling a north american accent in particular? Clear speech is not predicated on acquiring a certain accent and i feel you are feeding into the stereotype of an accent determining the quality of the speaker, not the content of speech. Edit - you ignore the fact that a native speaker of English may have an accent that is not North American. Think…

Many people learning foreign languages have a goal of sounding like a native speaker from a particular area. There is nothing wrong with that.

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

#47

Post by dannyw »

eldaisfish wrote: post #33
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 disagree fundamentally with the premise here. An accent is simply someone applying the rules of pronunciation from one language to another. No accent is right or wrong but your product seems to imply that North American accents are desirable or correct while accents rooted in non-english languages are less desirable. Instead of trying to "acquire an accent" why not focus on clarity of speech and pronunciation? If s…

Disagree with you here. For some people, accents can be a big personal issue. This helps solve that.

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

#48

Post by LukeEF »

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

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

#49

Post by ceilingcorner »

eldaisfish wrote: post #33
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 disagree fundamentally with the premise here. An accent is simply someone applying the rules of pronunciation from one language to another. No accent is right or wrong but your product seems to imply that North American accents are desirable or correct while accents rooted in non-english languages are less desirable. Instead of trying to "acquire an accent" why not focus on clarity of speech and pronunciation? If s…

The NA English accent is considered the most clear and easy to understand. This is not a controversial opinion and is held by virtually all non-native English speakers around the world.

Frankly there are billions of people who would kill to speak English like a native American. It’s about economics, not identity politics.

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

#50

Post by IMTDb »

IceDane wrote: post #40
karinaderbez wrote: post #4

Hi HN, we're Karina and Andres of Monto ( https://www.monto.mx/ ). We give employees of our affiliated companies access to their earned wages 24/7. We're currently operating in Mexico. With Monto users can pay for basic services (like water, electricity) on time, avoiding penalties. They can stop paying overdraft fees and avoid having to resort to abusive credit alternatives like shark loans, employer loans, payday l…

People who are not making enough money to make ends meet -- and thus end up with overdraft fees or having to make use of things like instant loans or credit cards -- don't need to get paid faster . They need to get paid more . Whether they can afford to live or not is a matter of simple arithmetic: money left = money made - expenses. Being able to tap into their underwhelming income faster to cover a mid-month bill d…

> People who are not making enough money to make ends meet [...] don't need to get paid faster. They need to get paid more.

Or they need to pay less. If the cost of being poor represents a significant fraction of the total spending for these people, lowering that through arbitrage is still a benefit.

I mistakenly went negative once on one of my bank accounts (purely due to sheer laziness/inattention), I was amazed by how expensive that small mistake was. People who are unfortunate enough to have than happen regularly spend a lot on those fees, especially compared to their almost non-existent disposable income. Anything that can help/reduce those expenses is a win in my book.

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