startupmania

SpeakingPal, which was covered by our hebrew sister-site several months ago, is making waves. The “cellular teaching” application, created by Eyal Eshed – founder of Omnivee, which was sold in 2005 to the american DVTel – and Ariel Vlikovski – former CTO of Comverse’s handset devision – is receiving some major partners and investors. Among them are Gigi Levi, CEO of 888 and Edusoft.

According to Eshed, SpeakingPal’s cellular learning solution will focus on teaching English. “The focus is on practicing speech for someone who is already familiar with the language, rather than new English students who are not proficient in the language.” Eshed tells that “the company is interested in simulating the experience of a private tutor, who listens to you while you speak, corrects your mistakes and demonstrates how a native-speaker will say the conversation bits you practice.”

SpeakingPal’s platform is based on server-client. The customer starts the application on his/her phone, and engages in a short conversation with SpeakingPal’s servers. “We call this service ‘Micro-Lesson’, and try for the conversation to be built of short sentences. On the server-end we have speech recognition engines that analyze the student’s sentences, correct his mistakes where necessary and even point out when he was more clear to a potential listener,” explains Eshed.

“The idea behind SpeakingPal is based on the assumption that from a pedagogical perspective, one needs to speak a lot in order to learn a language. We allow the student plenty of opportunities to engage in short, five-minute conversations and receive instant feedback, at a time convenient to him. There is no need to schedule a meeting with a tutor, coordinate or shift around your schedule. If you have five free minutes, you can take a Micro-Lesson.”

According to SpeakingPal, the two chief marketing channels for their English learning program will be “classic” marketers of cellular content and large-scale English teaching organizations around the world, that will offer hundreds of thousands of students the ability to make use of the Micro-Lessons whenever they see fit. In a talk earlier this week, Eshed told StartUpMania that he has already signed some prestigious contracts with important partners from around the world.

Translated by Itai Rosenbaum