Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #7
We’re Anada and Ilya, the co-founders of BoldVoice (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boldvoice.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boldvoice.com&#x2F;</a>). BoldVoice is an accent coaching app that helps non-native speakers learn and practice the standard American accent.<p>As immigrants to the US, we’ve personally experienced that having a foreign accent can affect your confidence and job opportunities (by as much as 20%, according to studies). So we built this app to help non-native English speakers like us.<p>Users start by watching 3-5 minute video lessons to learn new concepts from Hollywood speech coaches, like Ron Carlos, such as how to pronounce tricky sounds, or how to properly use intonation. They then spend around 10 minutes a day improving their accent skills by going through words, sentences, and conversations, with real-time feedback on their accent from the pronunciation assessment AI model.<p>The user tells us what their native language is during onboarding, and we serve them content on the typical accent and speech challenges that a person from that linguistic background faces in English. Regarding the feedback part, the user speaks certain words and sentences into the app, we record it, we compare each sound to the &quot;correct&quot; sound according to our library, and we spit out a score and a recommendation for what they should change.<p>The vast majority of language learning apps focus on grammar and vocabulary, not on speaking. Even when they do speaking, they score it broadly as &quot;right&quot; or &quot;wrong&quot; with no feedback on how you can improve. Learning an accent is all about muscle memory formed in the mouth&#x2F;lips&#x2F;teeth, not memorization in the brain—this is what most language learning apps get wrong.<p>Practicing the physical skills required to acquire an accent is a lot like working out, and with consistent work come results -- usually you can start seeing a difference within 2 weeks. Since launching 8 weeks ago, we’ve had startup founders, globally distributed teams, BPO firms and even middle school Spanish teachers pick up BoldVoice to start working on their accents and feel more confident in English.<p>We&#x27;d love to hear your experiences with accents and your comments about BoldVoice!