MyTurn

Inspiration

I rarely speak in group conversations. I blamed my English — but my IELTS speaking is a 7.5, a C1 level. The truth was, I was always waiting for the perfect moment. As someone who studies how we learn language, I knew the theory: we learn by taking part, not by getting everything right. I built MyTurn to help me — and others — stop waiting and start speaking.

What it does

You describe a real person from your life, and MyTurn lets you have a genuine spoken conversation with an AI version of them. When you finish, it doesn't grade you — it shows you the shape of your story, the phrases that worked, and a more natural way to say what you were reaching for, saved as a story card. The people in your stories become characters you can talk to again.

How we built it

Next.js, TypeScript and Tailwind, deployed on Vercel. Conversations and feedback run on GPT-5.6 via the Responses API. Speech uses the browser's Web Speech API. It was built with Codex as the core development tool, in a workflow where I directed product decisions and Codex wrote the code.

Challenges we ran into

Making the AI feel like a real conversation partner, not a questionnaire — it took several iterations to get short, natural, in-character replies with genuine repair instead of interrogation. Keeping the product honest: the AI never invents details of your story or your relationships.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A conversation that actually feels real — it reacts, asks, and draws more out of you. And a loop that turns a real conversation into a story, and the people in it into characters you can return to.

What we learned

That participation, not perfection, is what unlocks fluency — for a second language just as for a first. And that a product about learning through conversation could itself be built through conversation.

What's next for MyTurn

A living map of your relationships — every person a character, every conversation a story, all connected. Multimodal cues that make a partner feel fully present. And rehearsing the conversations that scare you most: an interview, a first day, an exam.

Codex Session ID

019f7698-9310-7fc0-9b78-84e35a20400b

This is the thread where the majority of core functionality was built (18–21 July). The full commit history from that session is public at https://github.com/ziyuewu21-collab/myturn

Built With

• chatgpt
• claude
• codex