How a San Francisco Startup Deploys AI To Teach Languages Faster
One of the most prevalent promises of AI is that it can teach languages faster and more efficiently than a human teacher. Speak is a San Francisco startup that is aiming to make that a reality through “superhuman” AI tutors. But can AI really replace human language teachers? Can AI speed up language learning to fast-track making real human connections in a new language? In this episode of Zoom In Zoom Out, Andrew Hsu, co-founder and CTO of Speak, discusses his idea of an AI language tutor and what is still missing in the AI-related San Francisco startup ecosystem.
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Can artificial intelligence really teach a new language faster than humans? That is the bet of San Francisco startup Speak, which has drawn more than 10 million users across Asia with its AI-driven tutoring platform.
Andrew Hsu, co-founder and chief technology officer of Speak, says the company is trying to rethink how people achieve fluency. “We view ourselves as, uh, sort of AI native language app, if you will,” he said. “And, uh, we're really using the power of all of these new AI models, LMS speech recognition models to build a language tutor in your pocket that you can scale to the entire globe.”
The platform focuses on practice rather than memorization. “It's a lot of focus on spoken fluency. We don't care about teaching explicit grammar rules or vocabulary. It's about giving our users an opportunity to speak out loud as much as possible, which is really what you need to become fluent,” Hsu said.
Founded in 2016, Speak has surged in markets like South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, where demand for English tutoring is especially strong. The app personalizes lessons from the moment a new user signs on. “Once you download the app onto your phone and then you start it, you have an onboarding experience where you're basically talking to an AI about what your goals are,” Hsu said. “Based on that, just like a human tutor would, we will customize the curriculum backbone so that everything that you're doing … actually feel really useful.”
The company’s growth has been fueled by close ties with OpenAI. “OpenAI actually led our series B, at Speak. And we're, you know, big fans. We use a lot of their models,” Hsu said. “We get a lot of early access to a lot of models and are able to start building product off in the months ahead of time. So, you know, it's a little peek into the future, which is really cool.”
That future, Hsu argues, is likely to involve more languages beyond English. “Part of the sort of power and promise of AI is also that it should become easier and more scalable for us to start teaching more and more languages and eventually, theoretically, go from any language to any language,” he said.
The startup is hiring aggressively, though finding the right talent is difficult. “Oh, hugely. Yeah. We are hiring as fast as we can in San Francisco, and it's not nearly fast enough,” Hsu said. “It's really hard to find people that … are very forward thinking about all of these AI tools and are able to, you know, keep up with how rapidly everything is changing.”
Despite concerns about AI reducing critical thinking, Hsu said the company’s goal is to strengthen human connection. “A huge part of the reason that people want to learn a new language like English is for human connection,” he said. “You want to be able to look somebody in the eye and then speak the same language as them and communicate. So that is really the goal that we're going after.”
For Speak, the challenge is less about replacing teachers and more about reimagining how technology can accelerate fluency worldwide.
