What, Sorry? — English Without Hesitation

Inspiration

For many Japanese English learners, the hardest part of conversation isn’t speaking—it’s understanding what the other person just said. And even when they don’t catch it, many people hesitate to ask for a repeat. They worry about being a burden or feel bad asking more than once. That hesitation can make learning English much harder.

What it does

What, Sorry? is an AI English conversation app that lets you ask “Could you say that again?” as many times as you need. Since you’re talking with AI, there’s no pressure and no embarrassment—just keep asking until it clicks.

How we built it

We built What, Sorry? as a Rust CLI application with GPT-5.6 Terra and Sol. The conversational AI runs on Codex App Server. Challenges we ran into Speech recognition was our biggest technical challenge. To make transcription as accurate as possible, we used Whisper and implemented the surrounding logic in Rust.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

You can ask for a repeat again and again without derailing the conversation. In a real conversation, repeated clarifications can make both people lose track of what they were talking about. What, Sorry? keeps the original context intact, so you can focus on understanding without losing the flow.

What we learned

What's next for What, Sorry? — English Without Hesitation

The current demo focuses on one scenario: ordering at a café. Next, we want to support open-ended conversations for any situation—not just predefined ones. We also plan to expand beyond English and support other languages.

Built With

• rust