Show HN: Sayso – We Fixed AI Phone Calls
saysoapp.com
YC w24 company here. We just pivoted from drone delivery and on-demand GPU rental back to our original idea - using AI for language learning.
The Sayso app uses interactive Stories, really good AI Phone Calls and immersive community posts to create a fantastic Spanish learning experience.
Sayso lets you “shop around” for the lesson/story you want to do. Each story contains - well - a fun story that lets you see Spanish used in real world contexts, has you say a few useful sentences out loud so you practice pronunciation and ends with a short phone call that puts you on the spot. At the end, new words are added to an FSRS5-powered flashcard stack (most efficient memorization algorithm). I can tell you, it’s a lot of fun, words just stick and you gain a lot of knowledge quickly.
Stories and phone calls are made to be fun and useful. E.g., instead of “how to order a coffee”, we do something like “a waiter spills coffee on you” - you can choose to be nice or yell at him. This way, phrases just stick really well.
There are also community posts, which are short videos in or about Spanish with a short exercise that lets you say a sentence out loud in the end. And there are phone call scenarios that are a bit longer.
As additional motivation, there are Amazon gift vouchers for the leaderboard toppers every week!
How did we get here? We were part of YC w24. We applied to YC with AI language learning initially but decided to work on drone delivery during YC given our ML & engineering backgrounds. Turns out, no one needs that and the unit economics simply don’t work out. Then we launched gpudeploy.com and got #1 on HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40260259]! But this didn't work out either - we turned into glorified car (Nvidia GPU) salesmen which we were not good at. So we went back to our original idea, language learning. We launched an initial app last year and now took the learnings and recently launched SAYSO.
It is available on iOS only for now.
Enjoy and have a nice rest of the weekend!