People struggling to learn English as a second language will soon have a tutor in the palm of their hands. Brock University graduate Milad Nourvand and his partner Hossein Tajarenejad are behind a new smartphone application to cut down on the learning curve. Nourvand, 30, the co-founder of LingUp, a program that perfects a person’s speech and understanding of the English language, is launching Sept.
1 on iOS and Android. It will cost between $10 and $20 based on monthly, or yearly plans. Last year, Nourvand was recognized for co-founding CareCanada, an artificial intelligence-powered search engine helping connect people with health-care professionals, through a program at the Brock LINCubator — the Learn, Ideate, Navigate and Collaborate incubator).
He was awarded a $5,000 Dobson Entrepreneurial Excellence Prize for the business pitch. Nourvand, a recent Iranian immigrant to Canada, experienced firsthand how complex English can be after studying it for more than a decade as a second language. “When I came to Canada, I found that I was having trouble talking fluently and confidently,” he said.
“Talking with my peers, other international students, I found they were experiencing the same problem.” He said that spurred him to find a solution that would allow people learning English the ability to practise and get feedback using artificial intelligence. “Fluency comes from regular practice with others, like language partners or tutors, but finding a language partner who matches your skill level and provides accurate feedback is difficult and sometimes impossible,” he said.
“And tutors can be expensive, especially if you want to have frequent sessions.” The application has been in beta testing for the past month, allowing the program to learn and interact with a select number of people. “We have some users, and we are getting a lot of good responses,” Nourvand said.
“We don’t just correct the student’s mistakes, we help the student understand them, save them for later, and it gives the student a chance to practise until they get it right,” he said. “It’s like having your personal language partner that’s always there to help you improve.” He said turning learned or passive knowledge into active knowledge, something that becomes second nature, can be difficult, but the application positions itself to increase the person’s proficiency.
“It’s called comprehensive input, where they learn vocabulary, grammar points, but when they want to actuate this, that’s where LingUp has positioned itself,” he said. “You talk with the AI, in a natural way with your level of proficiency. It understands you, and it continues talking with you, helping you improve one step at a time.
” Nourvand said factors pertaining to his English proficiency are thanks to a technology boom in AI, which allowed for the implementation of programs such as LingUp. “We had a technology shift in the last two years, which enabled us to build products to communicate with people, applications such as ChatGPT, and understand their language usage,” he said. “Before these LLMs (large language models), our idea wasn’t feasible to implement.
After, it can talk with people to understand their level and help them to improve.”.
