speaKopy

Speak French with confidence! Simply listen and repeat. Just like you learned your first language.

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Inspiration

While I was in France, my French friend was hugging his dog when he softly whispered, "Il faut se laver les dents" (we need to brush your teeth). To my surprise and excitement, I understood him instantly, despite the speed at which he spoke - and given my very basic French as an English speaker, that was a big deal. Fascinated by how effortlessly he said it, I found myself wondering how I could learn to pronounce that sentence as quickly and naturally as he did.

Asking him to repeat the phrase over and over eventually became tiresome for him, and it wasn’t helping me much either. So, I decided to record him using a music app called Koala. With the ability to listen and repeat, I practiced - and to my amazement, I mastered the phrase perfectly in just two minutes.

That’s when the idea for speaKopy was born!

(We've added "Il faut se laver les dents" as a free lesson - how long will you take to say it as quickly as the teacher?)

What it does

Welcome to speaKopy, the ultimate app for mastering French pronunciation and language skills!

Train your speech muscles and gain confidence faster than ever before.

With speaKopy’s intuitive interface, you can easily focus on and perfect individual vowel sounds, syllables, and phrasing. Tap on any word or phrase that interests you and repeat it out loud. That’s the secret! Your brain will build and refine intricate networks and patterns that control your speech muscles while deeply integrating them with your language models.

How It Works:

Listen and Repeat: Listen to small phrases or individual words and repeat them out loud.

Record Yourself: When you're ready, tap the microphone and record yourself.

Compare and Improve: Tap on your recorded words to compare them with the lesson's recording. Is that vowel sound quite right? Make adjustments as needed.

Be Precise:

Be an actor, a mimic – copy as exactly as possible with the same speed, rhythm, and pitches. Let your brain do its magic. It will be listening, noticing, learning, and refining continuously.

Learn More Than Just Speaking:

Spelling and Grammar: As you learn to say the many sentences, you will also be learning spelling and grammar simply by doing and speaking. By engaging with the language in a practical and immersive way, you’ll naturally absorb the rules and patterns of French spelling and grammar.

Why speaKopy Works:

Effective Practice: Just like great musicians, singers, and athletes, practice is key. Repeating and refining your skills is how you learned your own language – and it’s how you’ll master French too.

Intuitive Interface:

Tap, listen, repeat. It's that simple!

Confidence Building:

Gain the confidence to speak French with precise pronunciation and intonation.

You Are the Best Mimic:

We know you can do it because that’s how you learned your own language. You are the best mimic in the known universe!

Let’s Go!

Listen and repeat with speaKopy – the simplest way to train – and it really works!

How we built it

Lots of trial and error and learning swiftUI as I went. Close liaison with a French teacher. A lot of speaKopy's magic occurs behind the scenes - in developer mode, speaKopy has all the functionality to record or import lesson audio, edit the audio and text, and publish the lessons to firebase where they are immediately available to users.

Challenges we ran into

1) Speech recognition is not yet a perfected art, especially in French which has many homophones - words that sound the same but with different spellings. This was a huge challenge but I managed to develop methods to greatly improve the accuracy to a very satisfactory level. This is where speaKopy really stands out in comparaison to other language apps.

2) With speaKopy being useful to people from any nationality, I decided to use the Google Translate API for the UI texts, alerts, messages and lesson texts but worried about the costs incurred to speaKopy by users being able to potentially translate everything into 50+ languages. The answer was to translate only once with the Google Translate API when a user selects a new language or lesson. The translations are then cached in Firebase where later users of the same language will download them to their device cache, avoiding the need to translate or download them repeatedly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) Improving the results of Apple's French speech recognition. This code can be applied to other languages!

2) Caching translations efficiently.

3) An intuitive interface for auditioning any number of words or phrases accurately and its integration with speech recognition, speech synthesis, translation and dictionaries.

What we learned

It has huge potential. Not only learners, but also teachers have been very impressed with the beta. This leads me to consider allowing teachers to create their own lessons to incorporate in their teaching practice.

What's next for speaKopy

With 1.5 billion people currently learning English, my top priority is adding American English, followed by other languages. English and other languages have been tested successfully. I'm actively working on onboarding qualified teachers to help with this.

I’ve also got a roadmap of features to improve the user experience. The order and priority of these features will depend on feedback from users during the initial release, ensuring we meet the needs of learners around the world.

Built With

  • audiotoolbox
  • avfoundation
  • chatgpt
  • firebase
  • firebasefunctions
  • googletranslateapi
  • ios
  • logicpro
  • sfspeechsynthesizer
  • speech
  • subclub-podcasts
  • swiftui
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Updates

posted an update —

Well, that was intense! Submissions have just closed and my latest version 1.0.9 will clear App Store review today probably.

In this latest build I've set up remote config on Firebase to be able to tweak my 'Try our FREE lessons' messages without the need for a version update.

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