There are a lot of resources available for learning English, but not many for near-native English speakers who want to improve their fluency. This description rings true for Stan Beliaev and Yurii Rebryk, and it inspired them to create Fluently.
Fluently leverages AI to act as a coach, giving users feedback and tips on how to speak English. In this way, it is similar to ELSA and its AI speech tutor and one-on-one online and offline coaching solutions, except that Fluently listens to calls and structures its feedback.
Users can have Fluently record and transcribe real calls, for example when using Zoom for work. They also have the option to practice with an AI coach: “Ryan” for everyday chats and “Kyle” for mock interviews. This is often a priority for foreign candidates looking to land jobs that require advanced English skills, which is becoming more and more common.
While the two are trying to fill their own needs, they estimate that there are 84 million non-native employees working in English-speaking environments. It's unclear how many of those people wish they could be understood more easily, but the field is certainly a big enough niche that it's growing and is far less crowded than ESL overall.
Image credit: Fluently
This potential market allowed Fluently to join Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch and close a $2 million seed round before Demo Day with participation from Pioneer Fund, SID Venture Partners, and private angel investors.
Fluently's heavy reliance on the tech side of edtech also helps: Rebryk told TechCrunch that three of the distributed four-person team are engineers. He and his former college roommate have backgrounds in machine learning and the kind of track record that would interest venture capital firms these days, including internships at Amazon, Google, and Nvidia.
It might raise some eyebrows to hear that none of them are teachers, much less pedagogy experts, but building a product that they need gives them an advantage: they know that people who are already pretty fluent, for example, will be interested in the solutions available in the background and only pay attention to the problems that need to be addressed.
Another point is that Fluently aims to be a one-stop shop for improving speaking skills. The goal is comprehension, not accent, and this includes improving pronunciation, grammar, pacing and expanding vocabulary. Paraphrasing advice, like what Grammarly and Ludwig offer for writing, could be another added feature, Rebryk says.
In its current beta version, Fluently is clearly still in its early stages, and it's plagued by crashes. But for users willing to hand over their credit card information to try out the free trial, the app is already giving a clear sense of what it can do for you. For example, I've learned to pronounce “computer” better, which will be extremely useful when moving into a tech job. For at least some people, it might be worth Fluently's planned $25/month fee.
Image credit: Fluently
What Fluently can learn from Duolingo is to allow users to correct their mistakes and track their progress in a gamified format. This is usually the key to helping people achieve their goals, and language learning motivation comes in waves. But Fluently wants to use technology to focus on users' specific difficulties on their journey from near fluency to fully proficiency, rather than overall learning.
One concern with personalization is privacy, especially for apps that run in the background and have access to the microphone. For this reason, Fluently makes a point of telling users during onboarding that privacy is guaranteed, as audio is stored locally, encrypted, and data is protected from third-party providers. Regarding the latter, the startup states that “data sent to third-party AI providers for transcription is anonymized and not used for training.”
Rebryk says some of this is made possible by the recently released Apple Silicon, which ties into another limitation of the beta: it's only available for macOS. But Fluently has already built a waitlist of users, who will be notified when the Chrome extension is ready.
With that in mind, Rebryk said the seed round will help Fluently hire another team member and ensure it has the cash to spend on marketing when the time is right. “When you have a small team, you prioritize what needs to be done first,” he said with a smile.