Tellem

We designed conversations to feel real. Our AI tutors can nudge you into practice scenarios, but the flow stays natural.
We built progress tracking to keep motivation tangible. Even a short session leaves learners with a sense of accomplishment.
We wanted calls to feel like real phone conversations - same interface, same flow.
Not every learner wants small talk. That’s why we added structured scenarios - from ordering food to handling a canceled flight.
The AI remembers your interests and pulls them into conversation, making practice feel alive.
Feedback happens in the moment.

Inspiration

The best English teachers are held back by the laws of nature: there are only 24 hours in a day. Teachers spend an hour each with 7-8 students per day, on Zoom or in a classroom. But demand for English tutoring is high, and there are millions of English learners globally.

There are plenty of AI language learning apps. But we wanted to solve a core need for English teachers - and make AI tutoring a little more human. We partner with real English teachers to create their AI twins in our app, who can teach learners 24/7. We share revenue with teachers & and give learners an affordable way to get more hours of English speaking practice.

What it does

Users: English learners can call (or text message) their AI tutor 24/7. They can focus on practice scenarios (e.g. ordering a coffee), have long conversations, or just ask a quick grammar question. All the while: our AI is providing feedback on mistakes & constantly personalizing based on topics & themes the user brings up.

Teachers: We do revenue share partnerships with English teachers with significant Instagram or Tiktok followers (100k+). We work with them to collect audio, video, PDF's of their teaching materials. We feed this into ElevenLabs' Conversational AI suite to generate AI "twins" (agents) that teach like the real teachers. Our users talk & text with these agents in our app.

How we built it

To oversimplify: our app is essentially a UI/UX layer that contains a set of prompts, setting up various conversations with the AI ("help me pronounce kitchen items", "let's practice a flight check-in scenario", etc.). As learners practice speaking, we help track progress & save key memories that the AI can refer back to in future conversations.

Challenges we ran into

The whole experience is currently in English. And we encourage longform English conversations with the AI for practice. This means tellem is really built for more intermediate-advanced English learners. Users who are beginner learners have been excited about tellem, but ultimately don't find it a fit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) Successfully signed partnerships 5 teachers with significant social media presences.

2) Very promising retention numbers!

3) Seriously positive user feedback. Even while we push users to share honest/negative feedback, we continue to hear great things.

What we learned

Our teachers bring excellent credibility to our fledgling brand! Teacher content brought in users/followers/subscribers in no time. This has been great for solving the "cold start" problem of selling to consumers that require trust and are looking for crucial learning outcomes (English improvement).

What's next for Tellem

Spreading the word! This means upping the volume of content that our teachers post on their channels promoting Tellem. And then really scaling partnership ads to amplify our teacher-led messaging & get the content in front of high-intent users.