We want the AI to listen to everyone speaking English regardless of their accents and pinpoint what changes they need to make similar to what a speech therapist would do. The idea is that we want to serve the same function as a speech therapist but we train artificial intelligence to do that job. This technology could be used in a different application to help a different population, and that’s how ELSA was born in 2015. That’s when I got the idea that voice recognition in technologies like Alexa, Google Home, and Siri has become very smart but has primarily served Native speakers. When I finished my masters in education and my MBA and went to work at a consulting firm I faced this challenge again, so after a few years in consulting I decided to quit that job and work on a solution using technology to create an accessible solution for the billion English learners in the world. I knew a lot of my international friends have dealt with the same issue as well. Speech therapists can help with pronunciation and accent reduction through focused one-on-one time, but they are extremely expensive (charging $150-$200 an hour) and are thus not a realistic option for most people. I had friends who would watch YouTube and Netflix and try to mimic them, but this is one-way learning that is, there is no feedback. I started seeking solutions, and found most of them focused on vocabulary and grammar. I’d get embarrassed when people had to keep clarifying what I said. Lots of mistakes like these killed my confidence. I had some bad experiences walking into interviews and making mistakes that would throw the interviewer off and in turn throw me off. People would simply acknowledge that I said something and move on instead of trying to clarify. After this happened a few times I reached out to my friends and professors for feedback and realized that people had a very time understanding me unless they really paid attention. I would speak in classes and contribute my ideas but felt my ideas were being ignored. I understood grammar really well (perhaps better than the average American) and could read and write really well but speaking and being understood by American people was a huge challenge for me. Even though I had been learning English since I was five and felt quite confident in the language, I realized in my first few months in the US that English was not my advantage anymore but rather a disadvantage. I moved to Denmark for a few years and about 10 years ago I moved to the US to do my MBA and my masters in Education. I was born and raised in Vietnam and went to college there, so learning English has been a big part of my journey. I started the company in late 2015 out of some personal experience that I had. What inspired the creation of this company? I had the chance to interview Vu Van, CEO and co-founder of ELSA to talk about ELSA, entrepreneurship, and the future of AI. The San Francisco-based company announced last week that it received 7$ million in Series A funding in a round led by Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund) with participation from existing investors Monk’s Hill Ventures and SOSV. The company announced $7 million Series A funding this weekĮLSA is a mobile app that uses artificial intelligence and speech recognition technology to help language learners improve their English pronunciation.
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