She therefore decided to develop ELSA with her co-founder, to provide proprietary speech recognition technology.ĮLSA now has more than 4 million users from 101 countries and territories and has been growing organically in Vietnam, reaching almost 2 million users. She believes that most Vietnamese who have studied abroad had a similar experience in their first year, but there was no good solution to resolve it. “Many times people misunderstood me, and I lost confidence and felt quite embarrassed.” “When moving to the US for my MBA and Masters in Education at Stanford, my first year was very challenging because of my inability to speak English fluently, even though I was among the top students in English when I studied in Vietnam,” Ms.
“ELSA helps people solve that challenge in the most effective, personal, and economical way.”įounded in 2015, the idea for ELSA came from its co-founder’s personal experience in trying to learn English. “Pronunciation is always the biggest challenge in learning English and a barrier to speaking fluently and confidently, because when you speak English you need to speak clearly to ensure better communication at work and in many circumstances in daily life,” Ms. For example, the app has just released the Hotel module in collaboration with FPT Education, to help with training staff at five-star hotels in Da Nang. It is also introducing customized modules for companies to train their staff on industry-specific content. Each lesson is just two minutes and users complete five exercises that get progressively harder, including pronunciation of words, phrases, and sentences.ĮLSA recently developed a tool called Teacher Dashboard to help teachers integrate ELSA into their English teaching programs and monitor student progress. The app is updated regularly with seasonal and timely topics, like lessons featuring holidays or even the latest movies. There are around 600 lessons and more than 3,000 words on the ELSA app in a variety of topics, such as hotels, holidays, family, food and drinks, travel, entertainment, and education. This information is then used to build a personalized curriculum, tailored to the user’s current abilities.
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Users can download the app on Android and iOS easily, and ELSA then offers five-minute assessment test to identify the user’s pronunciation proficiency and their challenges.
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It also provides suggestions on how speakers can improve certain elements of pronunciation by explaining how to shape their mouth or tongue. The app operates by listening to the learner’s voice and then comparing their pronunciation with the correct English pronunciation to provide feedback. Van Dinh Hong Vu, Co-Founder and CEO of ELSA, told VET.ĮLSA’s strength lies in its proprietary AI technology in speech recognition, acting as a personal virtual pronunciation coach that gives instant and precise feedback on every sound you make. “Our main focus is always on making the best product possible with better technology and a more engaging experience for users, while continuing to grow user numbers around the world,” Ms. Unlike other platforms that focus mainly on teaching grammar and vocabulary, ELSA uses AI and speech recognition technology to help language learners with their pronunciation.
This pre-Series A round of funding was led by Monk’s Hill Ventures, which invests in post-seed stage startups in Southeast Asia. Learning English through apps is not a new idea in Vietnam, but in 2018 Vietnam’s startup community saw the arrival of the ELSA app, or “English Language Speech Assistant”, which raised $3.2 million for its AI-assisted language learning platform.