RoadLingo

Practical hands-free language learning

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Inspiration

I met a half German girl who was traveling to meet some of her relatives in Germany. I suggested that we both learn the language and we can write letters to each other in the language as a cute touch and to practice. I had a road-trip planned and wanted to learn from listen and repeat podcasts or something similar. The best that I found was coffee break German, which was decent, but in my friends words, "Either feels like I’m talking over them because they don’t pause for me to repeat a phrase or like I’m an inactive audience of them small talking in English". Roadlingo is designed to fix that so you are part of the conversation and have someone actually caring for your learning journey.

What it does

Allows learners to learn a language hands free so that they can go for a walk or a drive and pay attention to what's ahead of them rather than their phone screen. It uses 3 different methods to familiarize yourself with your language of choice. The first is a classic speak and repeat that helps guide you to the correct pronunciation. The section goes over what the word means, common phrases, grammar, and cultural context to immerse yourself in not only the language, but the country and region surrounding it. After you have learned the word we offer a review section of similar speak and repeat style. It follows the Leitner-tuning practices so that as you grow more comfortable with a word it gradually phases it out. The final core of the app is the podcast session to immerse the learner in the chosen language. The purpose of this is so that learners become familiar with the ebb and flow of the language. Each lesson is nearly entirely in the chosen language and builds on the lessons learned through a block approach. While it's not possible to have an entire podcast episode using only numbers and basic greetings, it is possible to have the core language built around the first 5 lessons (greetings, numbers, common phrases, names, and words), then the next 10 lessons and so on. While learners won't know every word spoken they will start to see the words they have learned used in context.

How we built it

The app is built entirely inside of bolt.new with supabase, deployed with netlify on IONOS + Entri, and may use a combination of elevenlabs and Tavus to produce the conversations (time permitting). Revenuecat takes care of the paywalls.

Challenges we ran into

The largest issues were the time it took to deploy with the no-code approach and that I found out about this hackathon 4 days before the deadline and in the middle of a 30-day build off against a couple of indie devs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The app was able to be built and has all 3 features. It's not perfect by any means by my friend found it charming.

What we learned

Not to glaze, but the fact that bolt was able to take my master spec and build out a good portion of it in one shot while having decent ui and branding was thoroughly impressive.

What's next for RoadLingo

Core features will continue to be built out. I'll have a soft launch on a few platforms to see if there's any willing users besides me and my friend. If there is I will start an organic growth campaign and if there's a lot of traction I will go on a serious funding campaign. Optimize for desktop and potentially iOS and android

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