Amiko

Your Bilingual Best Friend

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Backstory

At 19, I took a gap year to travel the world. My itinerary included 7 countries, the first being South Korea.

To survive, I learned the basics of Korean. But as I built a life there, I was inspired to go deeper. “What if we could connect on a deeper level? What if I felt like a local?”

I’ve since spent 1000s of dollars and 1000s of hours learning Korean. I’ve tried every method in the books: Italki tutoring, Anki flashcards, the green owl. What’s the problem they all share? They feel like a classroom.

I never enjoyed learning languages in school. But living in Korea, seeing the culture, & making friends? THAT inspired me to learn. And it inspired me to create Amiko.

Product

Amiko is your bilingual best friend. They’re an AI language exchange partner that…

  • speaks both your native language & the one you’re learning  💬
  • lives a local life in the country & loves sharing their culture 🌆
  • genuinely want to see you fluent 🫶

Amiko means “friend” in Esperanto, the universal language designed to connect people across linguistic backgrounds. Our company is called The Fluency Project—our goal is to increase linguistic and cultural fluency around the world 🌎🌍🌏

Your Amiko will share elements of their life & the culture as you converse together—Spotify links to the newest Kpop song, a new trending word, or venting about the issues in their local life. You'll be able to see a map of the city your Amiko lives in so that you can digitally explore the country together. And they'll be the best tutor you could imagine for learning a language—always one text or call away.

How we built it

I'm an iOS engineer by trade, so the app's in native iOS/SwiftUI. We used Supabase for database, Letta for agents, Livekit for calls, Elevenlabs for STT/TTS, RevenueCat for subscription management, Posthog for analytics, Raindrop for AI monitoring.

Challenges we ran into

Building Amiko as a solo founder has been tough. I obsess over building beautiful products—but I also love making great content. I've been more focused on making great content the last few weeks, which I've done a great job of, but which really slowed progress on the product. Finding a cofounder or raising money would help solve this.

Accomplishments we're proud of

Reached 250k+ followers & 100M+ views on Instagram/TikTok, and a waitlist of 10k+ for Amiko.

What's next for Amiko

  • Short term, we'll build the best possible experience for Koreans learning English. We'll add all sorts of features for conversation practice like scheduled calls, vocab practice, practice scenarios. We'll focus on improving the LLM chatting experience for better teaching & personalization. And we'll create a beautiful, cinematic onboarding experience.
  • Medium term, we'll add support to learn any language, from any language. We'll build out a really beautiful artistic world so you can explore the country as if you were there. We'll add delight with features like sending physical postcards to our customers' doors once a month.
  • Long term, we want to create the best possible immersive language learning experience. That might take the form of an explorable world in the app, a VR game, or more.

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