Learn Aksara Bali

Learn Balinese script through interactive lessons, explainable transliteration, and an infinitely patient AI tutor.

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Inspiration

As a Balinese, learning Aksara Bali (Balinese Script) is mandatory in school from elementary to high school, as an effort by the government to make sure the Balinese Script continues to flourish and always have living writers. As a student, I remembered I had struggled a lot with learning it because there was so many rules, glyphs, nuances you had to account for before you even write the script. And you're expected to move forward every grade with more and more complex rules, that if you forgot the previous class, you'll struggle, because they build on top of each other.

Why build it now? I realized that over the years, I wanted to reconnect with my home tradition and wanted to be able to re-learn the beautiful script that I had forgotten about after I finished high school. But I encountered the same problem as when I was learning in school: lots of scripts and rule and explanations that are non-interactive. I thought that I might not be the only one that has these problems. I know how to create software products, and know how to use AI agents so what can I do to help here? I decided to start making "Learn Aksara Bali", as an interactive course, with integrated infinitely patient AI agent to help users like me, students, or anyone who wants to learn Balinese to successfully get out of the door with Balinese script in a fun and interactive way.

And so, that's how Learn Aksara Bali came to be

What it does

Learn Aksara Bali has many features to help user successfully learn Aksara Bali:

  1. Interactive course: Course are designed to be interactive and to provoke thought for the user, lots of interactive element and bite-sized quiz to test out their knowledge, not just a text dump where they're expected to memorize everything, with literary sources if they want to dig deeper. Courses are tailored for Indonesian and English speaker with concepts they already knew
  2. Glyph explorer: Explore the unicode glyphs that made up the Balinese Script, also acts as a cheat sheet if you need a refresher
  3. Transliteration lab: Type a word, or sentences, and see why it is written or typed that way, segment by segment
  4. AI agent powered by GPT-5.6: JALI (JAlak baLI) will help you answer questions with his Balinese script skill, ask anything, even small questions, so you're confident with your understanding in Aksara Bali. JALI is infinitely patient, and is available 24/7 for all of your Balinese Script questions!

How we built it

I first start with GPT-5.6 Pro in ChatGPT to gather verifiable rules of writing Aksara Bali, which is the foundation of the course, transliterator, and JALI. The output is a collection of markdown documents "books" filled with rules and how to write Aksara Bali, with references to reputable sources.

I then used the Codex mode on ChatGPT to start the project. By creating multiple focused sub-agents with different 5.6 models according to their use case, and using the goal feature, I bootstrapped the app for MVP. Then using separate codex thread, I refined and cleaned up the app to be ready for production. That means polishing the UI, proofreading the content, testing flows end-to-end, all guided by many codex features. As a software developer, I also guided codex with my opinions on how I wanted the app to be built

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge is, unsurprisingly, how to structure the course and what to teach. Thankfully I had back and forth with ChatGPT + codex to solve this issue, and created a canonical "book" where all knowledge is built upon. Testing and verifying the code is also another issue, but with Codex browser use feature + unit tests, I feel confident that what we're shipping now is ready for users. Codex has helped from ideation to finished product throughout creating Learn Aksara Bali, which can condense weeks-months of work with multiple people to just days with one developer.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating an engaging course tailored to Indonesian and English speaker, and creating a transliterator that explains how to write Balinese. I Really want to get these in the hands of students so they can start practicing and improve their knowledge of Balinese Script

What we learned

I learned how to create an engaging course with many interactive elements, creating an AI agent that know Balinese Script, how to create a usable and simple UX, and most importantly, I started to reconnect with my own culture, and I hope that users of this app can feel the same way.

What's next for Learn Aksara Bali

Adding more advanced writing courses, improving the design and animations, and work with Government and teachers to make this project more official and widely adopted

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