Speak

San Francisco, CA

People spend $90 billion a year on human english teachers that are expensive and ineffective. Speak offers a mobile app where you can have english conversations with your phone about real world scenarios like interviewing for a job or asking for directions. It uses speech recognition to identify english words through thick accents and teach people to speak more clearly. Meanwhile, it’s building a massive database of accented-english speech, which can be used to improve its system and other speech recognition systems. Speak’s team formerly built accent detection systems and sold Flashcards+ to Chegg. Though AI translation might reduce the need for people to know other languages, speaking English remains a valuable skill people are willing to pay for.