AI-powered language app ELSA gives you confidence to speak English

For those who speak English as a second language, pronouncing every single word correctly can be a challenge. Even if you have reading and writing fluency, unshackling your mother tongue’s influence on your accent while speaking in English is no easy task. It takes years of practice to sounds like a native.

A little help can go a long way toward reaching that goal. That’s why Vu Van built an app called ELSA, which stands for English Language Speech Assistant.

Photo credit: Pxhere

Originally from Vietnam, Van spent several years studying at Stanford University to pursue her master’s degrees in business and education. Like many international students, her first year in America was challenging, as she was conscious about her spoken English even though she was among the top students in her English classes at home.

“When I discovered this problem, there was no good solution for it. When it comes to speaking, people could either go to a speech therapist that costs them around US$150 an hour or they could go watch YouTube or Netflix, which is a one-way learning solution,” Van told KrAsia in a recent interview.

English is a global professional language. A speaker must be clear for efficient communication at work as well as in daily life, Van believes. “A report suggests that people who speak English well with a clean accent earn 40% more than those who don’t,” she said.

Van recognized this as an opportunity. She and her partner Xavier Anguera, who has a doctorate in speech processing, decided to create proprietary speech recognition technology in 2015. “We use deep learning and AI to detect people’s pronunciation mistakes with 95%+ accuracy. ELSA listens to the way language learners pronounce words or sentences to pinpoint exact errors and provide real-time, accurate feedback on their mistakes, with specific suggestions on how to move their tongues and their lips in different positions so they can improve those pronunciation errors,” she said.

In other words, ELSA provides AI-powered one-on-one instruction for English-language learners.

The startup is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Portugal, India, and Vietnam. So far, it has raised US$12 million from investors in Silicon Valley and Asia, including Gradient Ventures, which is Google’s AI-focused fund. According to Van, the app has more than 6.5 million users from 101 countries, with 3 million users in Vietnam alone.

ELSA’s framework was trained using voice data of people speaking English with various accents, so it is capable of recognizing the speech patterns of non-native speakers, setting it apart from most other voice recognition technologies, Van said.

After downloading the app and stepping through the registration process, a user is given an assessment test to define her proficiency level. ELSA provides a score ranging from zero to 100, with most native speakers scoring 95 or above. The result helps ELSA personalize the user’s learning paths, highlighting which sounds hit the mark and which ones need adjustments. The platform makes suggestions for specific lessons that match a user’s proficiency.

The company implements a freemium business model. In addition to free learning sessions, users can access premium features called ELSA Pro to unlock more intense lessons. The subscription costs US$3 to US$6 per month.

Van said that ELSA saw rapid growth in paid subscriptions in 2018, when the number of paid users increased 3.5x from the previous year.

However, that positive development came with many challenges. Van said that while most people are willing to pay high tuition fees for English classes, some of the same people expect learning apps to be free. “We’d love to make it free for everyone, but then we wouldn’t have the resources in the long term to develop a world-class product to improve people’s lives,” she said. “The ELSA subscription is as affordable as possible. It’s equal to paying for one cup of coffee each month to learn correct pronunciations with ELSA.”

Partnering with schools and corporations