Speak

Speak is an AI-based language tutoring platform that enables users to learn languages by conversing with a chatbot. Speak's language learning apps help users engage in conversational practice without requiring a live tutor on the other end. The company's app features multiple language options, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese.

Speak hires approximately forty people across three offices in San Francisco, Seoul, and Ljubljana. According to the company, the app ranks first in popularity among English learning apps in South Korea, the company's primary market. Speak began by focusing on the South Korean market exclusively, although the company later expanded into Japan and has plans for more widespread international expansion in the future.

On March 2, 2023, Speak announced its partnership with OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition API called Whisper, which builds on earlier models of the API that the company had previously used on an open-source basis. Speak's introduction of the new iteration of the API resulted in general performance improvement through reduced latency and increased speech recognition accuracy. According to Speak, Whisper performs well in accented speech and multi-lingual speech (through code-switching), making it useful in language learning applications. With this new technology, Speak hoped to deliver more accurate feedback to its users in real time.