Taegyo

Inspiration

After moving to South Korea, we learnt about taegyo (태교), which is a set of traditional practices a pregnant woman can do to deepen mother-child bonding and ensure the health, emotional and cognitive capacities of their future baby.

Some of these practices, such as listening to Mozart's music for the future child's academic success, are unproven beliefs, but a deep dive in the existing scientific literature allowed us to identify 3 practices that are actually proven to be beneficial.

Native tongue recognition foundation by talking to the baby

A mother's voice is the most powerful and recognizable stimulus for a baby's brain development and native tongue recognition, fostering a deep and essential bond.

• Scientific Reference: DeCasper & Spence, 1986 (Maternal Voice Recognition)

Early foreign language priming through external audio stimulus

Exposing the fetus to the specific rhythms and phonetics of a new language builds a neural foundation, creating a cognitive advantage for future language learning.

• Scientific Reference: Movalled et al., 2023 (Fetal Sound Learning)

Healthy cognitive growth through positive maternal mindset and stress reduction

A mother's calm and positive mindset directly impacts the baby's development by reducing stress, which is crucial for healthy cognitive growth.

• Scientific Reference: Chan et al., 2014; Coussons-Read, 2013

What it does

Taegyo offers a daily 5-minute meditation for the future mother. She is prompted to read a short, positive affirmation aloud in Korean with a calming meditative music background. Then, in turn, the app immediately plays the corresponding sentence in English using AI text-to-speech.

This simple, interactive loop seamlessly integrates the three previous, scientifically-backed practices into one calming and rewarding daily ritual, helping future mothers to navigate taegyo practices more easily, untangling what is right now a confusing mix of tradition, folklore, and conflicting advice.

How we built it

1. We started by digging deep in the scientific literature to see how we can bring something helpful and scientifically grounded on the market. We used various AI's deep search features to do so.
2. We crafted the first 30 meditations together with two Korean friends who are currently pregnant and had them beta-test the concept by just reading those on a notepad.
3. We wrote exhaustive MVP specifications down to the look and feel of every button, iterating with gemini 2.5 pro and challenging our UX choices.
4. We built the application in two weeks with expo, react-native and cursor with gemini 2.5 pro max. About 80% of the code base was AI-generated, the remaining 20% being UX adjustments and fixes.
5. We refined the meditations and generated the English voice-overs using ElevenLabs.

Challenges we ran into

• Untangling what are simple beliefs and what are science-backed practices from taegyo, for which most resources are in Korean and Chinese
• Designing an experience that allows to combine the natural mother's voice with a native English pronunciation for English phonemes recognition priming
• Finding the right text-to-speech solution and voice to offer the most natural-sounding stimulus for the baby

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Building the whole application in two weeks, making what we believe is an optimised use of vibe coding tools
• Finding a meaningful issue to solve and bringing a solution that can actually help future mothers and have a positive impact on their pregnancy

What we learned

• The capabilities and limitations of vibe coding today and how to supervise them, especially the importance of referring to and updating constantly the specifications to get the best results, as well as create rules to get the best out of the AI model (we are both software engineers to start with)
• How to market on the South Korean market using its specific channels (Naver blogs, etc.)

What's next for Taegyo

• Android version
• Mother's voice cloning : we want to clone the mother's voice to read the English sentences with a native accent while preserving her natural tone to further reinforce the bonding effect
• Chinese language priming : alike to English, we want to offer the option to expose the baby to Chinese phonemes
• Internationalisation and release on new markets : while taegyo is mostly practiced in Korea and China, we believe it can benefit mothers all around the world, in countries where learning a second language is a must for success (so pretty much everywhere except for English-speaking countries)

Built With

• cursor
• eleven-labs
• expo.io
• firebase
• firestore
• gemini
• react-native
• revenue-cat