Title: Hello Hacker News,<p>When learning foreign languages, I made the most progress by speaking them throughout the day, every day. So I made a site where you can *speak* to an AI language teacher to practice both listening and speaking.<p># The product<p>*What I have now:*<p>* Multilingual speech recognition: You can ask a question in English and get an answer in your target language.
* Feedback on your grammar.
* Suggestions: See examples of what to say next to keep the conversation flowing.
* Speed: Choose a lower speed for beginners or a faster one for advanced levels.
* Translations: Click to see a translation into English (or another language).
* Role-playing: Practice real-life situations.
* Available to learn American English, British English, Australian English, French, Spanish from Spain, Spanish from Mexico, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Russian, and more.<p>*What I&#x27;d like to add:*<p>* More Situations&#x2F;Characters&#x2F;Customizations: A &quot;Creator mode&quot;.
* Feedback on your pronunciation.
* Text-based responses (Type or click – would feel like a &quot;Create Your Own Adventure&quot; book!)
* A dictionary.
* Phonetics: Zoom in and repeat a sound to help you hear phonemes and words more clearly.
* …and so much more!…<p># The startup<p>Been working on this for 6-7 months now.<p>I love this project and got lots of laudatory comments about it, but still find it hard to make it take off. 31% of people come back to it, traffic is growing through word of mouth with language teachers in schools or Telegram or private intranets sharing it with others. So that&#x27;s nice. But nice words alone don&#x27;t pay the bills.<p>My goal is to achieve enough growth to cover costs, which would then allow me to focus 100% on the product (currently it&#x27;s more like 50% of my time). But I&#x27;m not there yet.<p>A challenge I see is that most places forbid self-promotion. So I&#x27;m just not sure how on Earth I&#x27;m supposed to have a product take off. I could pay for ads, but I use AdBlock everywhere so this feels out of character. I&#x27;m a big fan of Pieter Levels (@levelsio on Twitter) because he&#x27;s doing things solo, so I&#x27;m trying to emulate the same kind of success. But it seems that something is missing.<p>What features would you find most useful? How can I better market this without resorting to ads?<p>Thanks for reading!  If you&#x27;ve got thoughts or ideas, I would love to hear them.<p>Cheers,
Fabien
Upvote: