There are many resources for learning English, but not so many for near-native speakers who still want to improve their fluency. That description applies to Stan Beliaev and Yurii Rebryk, and it’s what inspired them to create Fluently.
Using artificial intelligence, Fluently acts as a coach that provides users with feedback and advice on their spoken English. This makes it similar to ELSA and its AI speech tutor, as well as online and offline one-on-one coaching solutions, but with the difference that Fluently generates its feedback from listening to calls.
Users can have Fluently record and transcribe their side of actual calls, for example when using Zoom for work. However, there’s also the option to practice with an AI coach – either “Ryan” for day-to-day conversation, or “Kyle” for mock interviews, which are often a priority for foreign candidates hoping to land a job that requires advanced speaking skills of English, as happens more and more often.
While scratching their own itch, the duo estimate that there are 84 million non-native employees working in English-speaking environments. It’s hard to say how many of them wish they were more easily understood, but it’s undeniably a pretty big niche, a growing niche, and a much less crowded space than ESL as a whole.
This potential market is what helped Fluently acquire in Y Combinator’s winter 2024 batchand even before Demo Day, to close a $2 million round with participation from Pioneer Fund, SID Venture Partnersand individual angels.
The fact that Fluently leans heavily on the technology side of edtech didn’t hurt either. Of the distributed team of four, three are engineers, Rebryk told TechCrunch. With a shared background in machine learning, he and his former university roommate have the kind of track record that excites VCs these days, with internships at Amazon, Google and Nvidia.
It may be worrying that none of them are teachers, let alone educators. But making a product they need themselves gives them an advantage. For example, they know that people who are already quite fluent are more interested in a solution that can be used in the background and only draw their attention to issues that need to be addressed.
Another point is that Fluently wants to be a one-stop-shop for better speaking skills. Rather than pronunciation, its aim is comprehension, and this includes improving pronunciation, grammar and rhythm, as well as expanding one’s vocabulary. Rewording advice, such as Grammarly or Ludwig offers for writing, could be another addition, Rebryk said.
In its current, beta form, Fluently is clearly still in its early days and not immune to crashes. But for users who don’t mind sharing their credit card details to give its free trial a shot, it’s already giving a strong sense of what it could achieve. For example, your folks actually learned how to pronounce “computer” better, which can be very helpful when working in the tech field. At least to some, that could be worth the $25 a month that Fluently plans to charge.
There is still a page that Fluently could take from Duolingo to help users correct their mistakes and track their progress in a gamified way. This is usually the key to helping people stick to their goals, and motivation to learn a language tends to ebb and flow. But instead of learning across the board, he wants to leverage technology to focus on a user’s specific difficulties in moving from near-fluent to fully proficient.
An issue with personalization can be privacy, especially with an app running in the background that has access to the microphone. For this reason, Fluently insists on telling users upon onboarding that their privacy is guaranteed, with audio stored locally, encryption and data protected by third-party providers. Regarding the latter, the startup notes that “data sent to third-party Al providers for transcription is anonymous and not used for training.”
Some of that is made possible by the recent release of Apple Silicon, Rebryk said. This ties into another beta limitation: It’s only available on MacOS. However, Fluently is already creating a waiting list of users to notify when its Chrome extension is ready.
With that in mind, the seed round will help Fluently hire another team member and have cash 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.
