Hey YC,
I've spent a lot of time building something I wish I'd had when I was learning Spanish: an app that lets intermediate learners practice with real, interesting content. When I studied Spanish, I often got frustrated because native content had too many words and expressions I didn't understand.
Thanks to recent AI advancements, it's finally doable—but getting it right was tricky. It took setting up a multi-step pipeline and fine-tuning several AI models to make it work smoothly.
Here's how it looks in practice, turning a Spanish news article into a personalized language lesson:
- Simplify the article to match the student's current skill level.
- Add language elements the student is currently studying (like the past tense or certain phrases).
- Include specific vocabulary words the student is learning to reinforce them in context.
- Use another AI model to tokenize and lemmatize the text so the app can accurately recognize each word's context and offer quizzes, definitions, and comprehension checks.
- Automatically link words and expressions to detailed dictionary entries.
- Generate high-quality audio with ElevenLabs for authentic listening practice.
There are a few smaller steps involved too, but those are the main ones.
I think Topics is the first app to create fully personalized, contextual language lessons directly from current news content.
I'd love to hear your thoughts! If you're interested in trying it out, send me a PM—I can give you an access code in exchange for your feedback :)
