Nuance + PlaySay = Voilà!

I mentioned in this post why we've chosen Nuance as our linchpin voice technology partner for PlaySay. Although it's against common practice, let's expose some of Nuance's and PlaySay's magic with a walk-through of how we enable English and Spanish learners to have real conversations with pronunciation feedback. 

Assuming English is your native language, you'll say the phrase in English first.

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Great job! Your English better be good, that's what your Spanish partner (learning English) will hear. The cool thing for you is that you now unlocked its Spanish counterpart! We knew that your English pronunciation was awesome via Nuance's speech recognition technology. We're beginning to integrate proprietary adaptive voice recognition algorithms atop Nuance's already state-of-the-art voice recognition. We can't expose all of our magic but can say that we're constantly improving our adaptive algorithms that take into consideration your unique voice, gender and accent. 

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Play its Spanish counterpart as many times as you need to for it to sink in to your memory. You're hearing Nuance's text to speech (TTS) here. Soon, we'll be replacing TTS with the highest ranked real native Spanish PlaySayer's voices. 'Parrot' the Spanish phrase that you're hearing with as much pronunciation accuracy as possible.

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Oops, we know your pronunciation wasn't great via Nuance's speech recognition technology. Please try again!

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Don't be shy, we've removed the embarrassment problem by letting you know exactly what to say and how to say it. Your Spanish partner isn't directly in front of you. Take it easy, take your time. Say it as many times as it takes to get it correct. 

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Are you a native Spanish speaker? It sounded like you were, awesome! Play back your sweet Spanish voice, sulk up the glory. You rock. Now send it along to that Spanish partner of yours.

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Sweet! They'll get back to you shortly by doing the same process in reverse.

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"Nudge" your partner if they don't get back to you as soon as you'd like. 

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Just by speaking, you're helping each other learn a language!

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Check out your phrase book to reference all the phrases you're mastering!

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Join the fun, PlaySay today!

Don't Draw Something, PlaySay Something!

TechCrunch compared PlaySay to the wildly successful Draw Something. We were quite flattered, thank you TechCrunch. How'd you know that's where we were going?!

With nearly 5,000 users since our launch last week, one of the most common requests was to reduce the amount of needed clicks in the app's core experience. We of course listened. PlaySay 1.2 is available in the app store as of today, featuring:

☞ Entire game board redesign to drastically reduce clicks to get into a current game 

☞ 'Nudge' functionality to get those lazy partners of yours to reply 

☞ Removal of 'Survival' missions (for now) 

☞ Entire system improvement to make everything in the app load faster 

☞ 'Matches' algorithm improved to show the best options for you as opposed to merely an alphabetical list (to prevent this from happening)

★ What's Next? ★ 

Although PlaySay has received 45 perfect five-star ratings, it can get so much better. Below are the updates we're working on for PlaySay's next version. Please let us know which you feel are most important to you (or suggest others) so that we may know which features to work on first. 

1. Ability to post your entire conversations (mp3) on Facebook to show off your Spanish skills
2. Spanish localization
3. Significant speed and stability improvements
4. Push notification improvement to upon open, go directly to the respective conversation
5. Recording flow revamped to be simpler and faster
6. Gradual immersion into Spanish in recording flow and dialogues
7. Game achievements more pronounced

We take every review very seriously and do our very best to update the app accordingly. Please don't be shy! We'd love to hear your feedback, questions, etc. Just email us at support@playsay.com.

Ok, is PlaySay TOO Engaging?!

Sorry Aaron, we didn't foresee you receiving 143 Spanish voice messages in the last 24 hours. We're glad you're being a great sport about it!

I have to admit, I didn't realize he was talking about messages in our app at first. I think his comment is so funny, "I can't keep up but I'll surely learn some damn Spanish." This made our day in the office. Actually, Aaron, your comment epitomizes our company commandment of, "Engagement 1st, Learning 2nd". Hoooohahahahhaha (evil laugh). Our masterplan is working quite nicely. It's only the first week, however, so by no means are we getting ahead of ourselves. We have a hard road ahead to maintain users' long-term engagement and lots to improve upon!

Speaking of improvements, we didn't account for these red notification bubbles (shown above) to have triple digits. #humblebrag

In full transparency, these two users are probably getting "blown up" because their first names are at the top of the "matches" list of the app which is in alphabetical order. We're addressing this issue with many others in our next app update that we're submitting to Apple tomorrow. Stay tuned and Happy PlaySaying!

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Download PlaySay to start speaking Spanish like a pro