Umi

My co-founder and I set out on a mission to make it possible to become fluent in a foreign language without moving to a foreign country.

We wanted to solve one of the core problems in language learning, which is that many language learners are unable to understand native speech after taking a course or using an app. You may be familiar with this problem if you've ever taken high school Spanish/French/etc or spent time using Duolingo.

In my early life experiences, I had discovered that the best way to gain comprehension ability is via immersion learning (Input Hypothesis). I needed to help others learn this same way.

To do this, my cofounder and I created an immersive app experience that turned real world videos into bite-sized language lessons. These lessons helped learners gain multiple skills at once, including listening comprehension, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

From a technical perspective, LLMs helped us solve problems that were previously expensive to solve at scale such as clipping videos semantically, validating subtitle accuracy, explaining words & phrases, sentence separation (Japanese, Chinese), and contextual definitions.