Ditto!

Inspiration: Why are people stuck with the accent you were brought up to speak? Accents define who we are and are part of our cultural capital. We found that speaking an accent reduces your chances of getting a job compared to applicants with the same criteria.

What it does: Our iPhone application allows users to enjoy a 3-minute daily practice of speech exercises in a new accent. We are starting with a standalone app focused on Posh British English or Standard American English, as people with accents face discrimination through recruitment. This way, users can add a new accent to their accent vocabulary.

We have used 11labs to build an iPhone application that gives you snippets of popular media content and tongue twisters used by speech therapists.

How we built it:

Features: Play a list of speech exercises and read along with them Jump back, forward Option to subscribe for more daily content and support the app creators. The first 90 days of exercises are bundled onto the device to reduce complexity and allow offline learning.

Tech Stack: ElevenLabs.io for initial voices ChatGPT for initial written content

Challenges we ran into

In a team of a developer and a marketer who did not know each other prior, we learned to "speak each other's language" better and better through the hackathon. We matched on complementary specialties and divided up responsibilities. Tove focused on product, marketing and branding, and J'aime concentrated on product and building the prototype.

Additionally, J'aime did a couple of product interviews to assess the need for our product and which features would be core to solving this problem. We also researched copywriting laws from Tove's husband, who worked with copywriting at YouTube, to access which content we could use to practice accents.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We came in with no previous prep and quickly put this first MVP together.

What we learned

• There is an exception in copywriting law under the Teaching Act for non-profits, so we could potentially use pop-cultural content like movie quotes and so forth for our app freemium version further on.
• Accent bias is a real problem, especially for women, where the unconscious biases, according to our research, pile on top of each other in the recruiting process.

What's next for Ditto!

The model / AI: From this jumping-off point, we can go on to grow our model … to automatically do all of the things that a speech therapist can offer. We would also like to add more accents so that people can wear different accents for different occasions, not only to combat discrimination.

Social Impact: We want to eliminate discrimination based on accents and empower people by working on their speech skills in a broader sense.

Built With

• chatgpt
• elevenlabs.io