There are many resources for learning English, but not as many for near-native speakers who still want to improve their fluency. That description applies to Stan Beliaev and Yurii Rebryk, and this is what inspired them to create Fluently.
By using AI, Fluently works like a coach that gives users feedback and advice on their spoken English. This makes it similar to ELSA and its AI voice tutor, as well as one-on-one online and offline coaching solutions, but with the difference that Flufully generates its feedback by listening to calls.
Users can fluently record and transcribe their version of real-life calls, for example while using Zoom for work. However, there is also the option to practice with an AI coach, either “Ryan” for everyday chats or “Kyle” for mock interviews, which are often a priority for foreign candidates hoping to land a job requiring advanced English-speaking skills, as is increasingly the case.
While scratching their own itch, the duo estimates that there are 84 million non-native employees working in English-speaking environments. It’s hard to say how many of them would like to be understood more easily, but it’s arguably a pretty big, growing niche, and a much less crowded space than ESL as a whole.
This potential market is what helped Fluent achieve in Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 Promotionand even before Demo Day, to close a $2 million seed round with the participation of Pioneer Fund, SID Venture Partnersand individual angels.
It also hasn’t hurt that Fluently is heavily focused on the edtech sector. Of its four-person distributed team, three are engineers, Rebryk told TechCrunch. With a shared background in machine learning, he and his former college roommate have the kind of track record that excites venture capitalists these days, with internships at Amazon, Google, and Nvidia.
It may seem strange that none of them are teachers, let alone experts in pedagogy, but creating a product that they themselves need gives them an advantage. For example, they know that people who are already fairly fluent are more interested in a solution that can be used in the background and only draws their attention to issues that need to be addressed.
Another point is that Flufully wants to be a one-stop shop for improving speaking skills. More than accent, its goal is comprehensibility, and that includes improving pronunciation, grammar and rhythm, as well as expanding vocabulary. Rephrasing advice, like what Grammarly or Ludwig offer for writing, could be another addition, Rebryk said.
In its current beta version, Fluently is clearly in its early stages and isn’t immune to glitches. But for users who don’t mind sharing their credit card details to try out the free trial, it already gives a clear idea of what it could achieve. For example, one server has learned to pronounce “computer” better, which can be very useful when working in the tech sector. At least for some, that might justify the $25 per month that Fluently plans to charge.
There’s still a page Flufully could take from Duolingo to help users correct their mistakes and track their progress in a gamified way. This is often key to helping people meet their goals, and motivation to learn a language tends to ebb and flow. But rather than learning in general, it wants to leverage technology to focus on a user’s specific struggles to move from near-fluency to full mastery.
One concern that personalization can raise is privacy, especially with an app running in the background and having access to the microphone. For this reason, Fluently makes a point of informing users during onboarding that their privacy is guaranteed, with audio stored locally, encrypted, and data protected from third-party providers. On the latter, the startup notes that “data sent to third-party AI providers for transcription is anonymized and not used for training.”
Some of this is possible thanks to the recent release of Apple Silicon, Rebryk said. This ties in with another limitation of the beta: it’s only available on MacOS. However, Flufully is already building a waiting list of users it will notify when its Chrome extension is ready.
With that in mind, the seed round will help Flufully hire another team member and have cash to spend on marketing when the time is right, Rebryk said. “When you have a small team, you prioritize what to do first,” he said with a smile.