Show HN: Echo Prof – An app for studying that you can talk with | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Echo Prof – An app for studying that you can talk with

echoprof.com

2 pointsdavid_d123454 comments

Hey folks!

I built Echo Prof (echoprof.com) for mobile (iOS/Android). It's an app for studying that you can talk with. Basically, Echo Prof says a word out loud, and you can answer by speaking (there's language support for many languages). Then Echo Prof keeps track of what questions you should review the most often.

I think lots of people would like the app if they knew it existed (evidence is that Anki community is large, Duolingo community is large).

I'm looking for help to take the app to next level. I've been coding it for a couple years now, and I think I'm at a point where I can't really take the app much further on my own. Does anyone have any advice for finding a teammate or part-owner? It would be really helpful if I could find someone who could do a bit of marketing and maybe some design work.

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That reminds me of an idea I had for a language learning app, to help people improve their pronunciation and intonation. Basically it would prompt the user with two similar sounding words, like "were" and "where", and get them to record themselves saying each one, and then they could hear a native speaker say each word, and they could grade themselves on how close they got.

The idea would be that over time, the user would train their ear to listen out for the differences between the sounds, and even be able to go back and listen to old recordings of themselves, to appreciate the progress they've made.

Yeah! The app has all of that functionality except for the recordings. That might be cool to add in the future… it would probably take up gigabytes of space, though. Maybe when storage is smaller and less expensive

Just gotta find someone who’s into marketing to see if people will like it enough to justify continuing work on the app.

> it would probably take up gigabytes of space, though.

That's an interesting question. Some quick searching gives me these figures:

* Knowing 10,000 words in a given language is considered the level required for fluency

* A standard speaking speed is 130 words per minute, or 7800 words per hour

* At 256 kbps, a minute of music takes 2 MB of storage, or 120 MB for an hour.

Let's say the app contained a professional recording of 7800 words (which should be more than enough for teaching just pronunciation and intonation), and let the user record up to 4 attempts at each word (e.g. their first attempt, their latest attempt, and a couple of intermediate attempts). That would mean 5 copies of roughly an hour's worth of speech, so 600 MB of storage. For comparison, that's about 1 or 2 minutes of iPhone 4K video.[0]

Anyway, thanks for giving it consideration, and I'm sorry I don't know anyone's who's into marketing. I wish you every success with the app!

[0] https://www.macxdvd.com/mac-video-converter-pro/4k-video-fil...

Come to think of it, it's a really cool idea - and I'd like to do it if I could justify the work involved, but if this app ends up just being for me and a dozen other people, maybe I should spend my time on Earth working on something that produces more value for people.

But let's say you study for thirty minutes each day for a month - 0.5hrs * 30days = 15 hours...

And maybe half of that time is your recordings, so 7.5 hours of recording... that's about 1gb of recordings a month...

So if you're a decent student who studies on average 30 minutes a day, that's 1gb of space on your phone a month... I have a fancy phone (that I'm not a big fan of, but that's another story), and it only holds 64gb. So your proposal is actually very doable... but it would need to be done thoughtfully... Especially if you're a diligent student and study for a number of hours each day...

Maybe that would be a way to support the app - hold the data on a paid cloud service or something for users to go to and check. I'd be happier with that than putting advertisements up.

Thanks for the good wishes!

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