Ekko

Ekko is a language learning app that *actually* helps you become fluent in a language. All you need is enough repetitions & an AI on your side to help quiz you on what you retained while learning.

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Inspiration

I've been learning Korean for a couple of years now but all of the language learning apps i've tried suck. They are either too gamified (Duolingo) or not personalized enough to what i'm looking for (Speak). I just wanted to learn Korean from a native speaker without having to pay for a pricey tutor. From this pain point i had, I realized that learning by repetition was the fastest way to fluency but just using youtube itself wasn't enough for me. So I created Ekko.

What it does

Ekko is a web app and chrome extension for language learning. Users can use the video library we've curated of videos of native speakers they can shadow and repeat after. Or they can paste in their own youtube video. We record how many repetitions per sentence they have completed, add phrases to their learning notebook, and most importantly, offer an AI assistant who will test them using the video transcript on how well they are able to speak the language and retain the vocabulary they just studied. We use a speech to speech approach so the user doesn't have to worry about typing in a new language and the elevenlabs API to make our AI's voice sound just like a native speaker's would.

How we built it

I used bolt.new to make our landing page, dashboard, and learning notebook (essentially the entire web app). I made the chrome extension myself + with claude code. I deployed on netlify and used supabase for my waitlist (45 users strong!) and edge functions for my api calls to openai and poix for getting the youtube translations. I'm using eleven labs for natural sounding AI's for back and forth speaking practice.

Challenges we ran into

At first i had a lot of trouble getting the transcriptions from youtube without being able to use their API but I found some workarounds and was able to get them from video's and store them in the database so my AI can use them for quizzing our users after they practice the video.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting 45 users pretty quickly. Building this in just 2ish weeks. I'm very proud how I feel like this solved my own pain point and that I actually use my own app on a daily basis now to improve my Korean.

What we learned

I learned that vibe coding is actually still very difficult and i'm grateful to know what i'm doing or else I don't think the average person could actually deploy something useful yet without knowing all the ins and outs of all the different platforms you have to use to launch a product from 0-1.

What's next for Ekko

Getting my 45 users feedback who many have agreed to meet with me this week to go over the features and feel of the app. I also plan to add more languages and enhanced AI voice models as well with less latency for the user.

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