There are many resources to learn English, but not so many for near-native speakers who still need to improve their fluency. That description applies to Stan Beliaev and Yurii Rebryk, and that is what inspired them to create Fluently.
Making use of AI, Fluently operates as a coach that provides users feedback and tips about their spoken English. This makes it akin to ELSA and its AI speech tutor, in addition to online and offline one-on-one coaching solutions, but with the difference that Fluently is constructing its feedback from listening to calls.
Users can have Fluently record and transcribe their side of real-life calls, for example while using Zoom for work. Nevertheless, there’s also the choice to practice with an AI coach — either “Ryan” for each day chit-chat, or “Kyle” for mock interviews, which are sometimes a priority for foreign candidates hoping to land a job that requires advanced English speaking skills, as is increasingly more often the case.
While they’re scratching their very own itch, the duo estimates that there are 84 million non-native employees who work in English-speaking environments. It is difficult to say how a lot of these would really like to be understood more easily, but it surely is arguably a big enough area of interest, a growing one, and a much less crowded space than ESL as an entire.
This potential market is what helped Fluently get into Y Combinator’s winter 2024 batch, and even before Demo Day, to shut a $2 million seed round with participation from Pioneer Fund, SID Enterprise Partners, and individual angels.
It didn’t hurt either that Fluently leans heavily on the tech side of edtech. Out of its distributed team of 4, three are engineers, Rebryk told TechCrunch. With a shared background in machine learning, he and his former university roommate have the type of track record that gets VCs excited nowadays, with internships at Amazon, Google, and Nvidia.
It might raise eyebrows that none of them are teachers, let alone pedagogy experts. But constructing a product they need themselves gives them an edge. For example, they know that folks who already speak quite fluently are more all for an answer that may be utilized in the background, and only calls their attention to issues that need addressing.
One other point is that Fluently desires to be a one-stop-shop for higher speaking skills. Somewhat than accent, its goal is understandability, and that features improving pronunciation, grammar and pace, in addition to expanding one’s vocabulary. Rephrasing advice, like Grammarly or Ludwig offer for writing, might be one other addition, Rebryk said.
In its current, beta form, Fluently is clearly still in its early days, and never proof against crashes. But to users who don’t mind sharing their bank card details to provide its free trial a spin, it already gives a robust sense of what it could achieve. For example, yours truly learned higher pronounce “computer,” which may be quite useful whenever you work in tech. To not less than some, that might that be definitely worth the $25 a month that Fluently plans to charge.
There’s still a page that Fluently could take from Duolingo on helping users correct their mistakes and keep track of their progress in a gamified way. This is generally key in helping people persist with their goals, and motivation to learn a language tends to have ebbs and flows. But moderately than learning overall, it desires to leverage technology to give attention to a user’s specific difficulties in going from nearly fluent to completely proficient.
One concern with personalization may be privacy, especially with an app that runs within the background and has mic access. For that reason, Fluently insists on telling users during onboarding that their privacy is guaranteed, with audio stored locally, encryption, and data shielded from third-party providers. On the latter, the startup notes that “data sent to third-party Al providers for transcription is anonymized, and never used for training.”
A few of that is made possible by the recent release of Apple Silicon, Rebryk said. This ties into one other limitation of the beta version: It is barely available on MacOS. Nevertheless, Fluently is already constructing a waiting list of users it would notify when its Chrome extension is prepared.
With this in mind, the seed round will help Fluently hire one other team member, and have money to spend on marketing when the time is true, Rebryk said. “When you’ve gotten a small team, you prioritize what to do first,” he said with a smile.
