There are many resources for learning English, but not so many for individuals who speak almost natively but still need to improve their fluency. This description is about Stan Beliajew and Yuri Rebryk and this is what inspired them to create Smoothly.
Using AI, Fluently acts as a coach that provides users feedback and suggestions on their spoken English. This makes it just like ELSA and its AI speech tutor, in addition to online and offline one-on-one coaching solutions, but with the difference that Fluently builds its feedback based on listening to conversations.
Users can have Fluently record and transcribe their side of a conversation in real life, akin to when using Zoom at work, but there’s also the choice to practice with an AI coach — either “Ryan” for on a regular basis chats or “Kyle” for mock job interviews, which are often a priority for international candidates trying to land jobs that require advanced English skills, which is becoming more common.
The duo, scratching their heads, estimate that there are 84 million foreign employees working in English-speaking environments. It’s hard to say how many of them would really like to be more easily understood, but it’s probably a large enough area of interest, growing, and a much less crowded space than ESL as a whole.
This potential market helped Fluently capture for the 2024 Y Combinator winter batchand even before Demo Day to shut a $2 million seed round with participation Pioneer Fund, Venture Partners SIDand individual angels.
It didn’t hurt that Fluently leans heavily into the technical side of edtech, either. Of the distributed team of 4, three are engineers, Rebryk told TechCrunch. With a combined background in machine learning, he and his former college roommate have the type of backgrounds that excite today’s enterprise capitalists, with stints at Amazon, Google, and Nvidia.
It may come as a surprise that none of them are teachers, let alone pedagogical experts. But creating a product that they themselves need gives them an advantage. For example, they know that individuals who are already fairly fluent are more interested in a solution that might be used in the background and draws their attention only to the issues that need solving.
Another point is that Fluently desires to be a one-stop solution for higher speaking skills. Instead of accent, its goal is comprehensibility, and this includes improving pronunciation, grammar and pace, in addition to expanding vocabulary. Paraphrasing advice like Grammarly or Ludwig offers for writing might be one other addition, Rebryk said.
In its current beta form, Fluently is still clearly in its early stages of development and is not crash-proof. However, for users who don’t mind sharing their bank card details to check out a free trial, it already gives a strong sense of what it will possibly achieve. For example, I learned to pronounce “computer” higher, which might be very useful when you’re employed in the technology industry. For at least some, it could be value the $25 monthly that Fluently plans to charge.
There’s also a page Fluently can pull from Duolingo that helps users correct mistakes and track their progress in a game-based way. That’s often key when it involves helping people work toward their goals, and language-learning motivation ebbs and flows. But slightly than general learning, she wants to make use of technology to focus on the specific struggles a user has in moving from near-fluent to completely fluent.
One concern with personalization might be privacy, especially with an app running in the background and getting access to the microphone. For this reason, Fluently is making it a point to tell users during onboarding that their privacy is guaranteed, with audio stored locally, encrypted, and data protected from third-party vendors. On the latter, the startup notes that “data sent to third-party AI vendors for transcription is anonymized and not used for training.”
Rebryk said that this is partly possible due to the recent launch of Apple Silicon. This is related to a different limitation of the beta: it is only available on macOS. However, Fluently is already building a waiting list of users, which it’ll announce when the Chrome extension is ready.
With that in mind, the seed round will help Fluently hire one other team member and have money 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.