How My Sivi Is Using AI To Help People Become Proficient In Spoken English

Despite being one of the largest English-speaking nations in the world, a sizable chunk of the Indian populace finds it difficult to communicate proficiently in the language. For context, of the 1.4 Bn Indians living in the country, it is estimated that only 265 Mn individuals are competent in the language. The wide gap could be blamed on the limited exposure to the language, rural-urban disparity and more influence of the mother tongue.    

Bridging this is My Sivi, an English language learning AI platform, which has been designed to make Indians proficient in the language. But little does anyone know that the platform is the product of its founder’s inhibition of being unable to maintain a steady conversation in English.

Well, the background story of My Sivi goes like this… After completing his schooling from a government school in Uttar Pradesh, Shivam Gupta (a native of UP’s Prayagraj) joined Delhi University to pursue BSc (Hons) in Mathematics. While getting enrolled at the nation’s one of the top varsities was a dream come true for Gupta, it also unlocked his biggest fear — difficulty in maintaining a steady conversation in English. 

This spurred him to take English classes but to no avail. Gupta still lacked command over the language. His tryst to be proficient in the language continued beyond 2015 when he cracked IIT-Kharagpur to pursue MTech in Computer Science and Data Processing. 

About to appear for campus placements, Gupta unlocked another fear in 2017. He found that his obsession with the language would make him jittery to appear for job interviews.    

“When the time for placements came, my problem with English took a more serious turn as all the job interviews I had to sit for were conducted exclusively in English. Even after managing to get jobs in MNCs, Huawei and Microsoft, during my professional career, the comfort level with English still wasn’t there,” Gupta said. 

Speaking with Inc42, Gupta said he had always wanted to take the entrepreneurial plunge but did not get the chance to. However, as luck would have it, the pandemic wreaked havoc on the planet, forcing people to stay in the confines of their homes.

This opened up a window of opportunity for Gupta, who then reconnected with his old folks, Akshay Sanghai and Anoop Jaiswal, to solve a real-world problem. Their trio zeroed in on building a platform that could provide on-demand access to vetted contractors and freelancers, gather client requirements, find freelancers, assign tasks and track projects. 

Their idea was selected by Y-Combinator under its winter cohort in 2022. However, as they moved forward with their plan, they encountered major execution and regulatory issues, triggering a change of plans.

While brainstorming for a new solution, the cofounders brought forth the challenges that a majority of Indians face while conversing in English. The cofounders decided to leverage AI and ML to develop a solution that can help people learn the language with ease.

Given that the trio was trying to solve a real-world problem, their idea got full support from the VC firm, which ended up infusing $500K in their endeavour. Thus, Speakify AI was born in September 2022. But the trio had to change the name later. 

From Speakify AI To My Sivi  

With support from Y-Combinator, the new startup started offering users instant feedback on their spoken English. The app was exclusively a conversational AI chatbot. 

“I knew large language models (LLMs) before ChatGPT was launched. Before ChatGPT, OpenAI had launched primitive AI languages like DALL-E and text-davinci-003. In 2022, we fine-tuned davinci-003 on data accessed from open source and trained it on the basis of conversational data to behave like an English teacher. The outcome was an AI-based language teacher app, Speakify,” Gupta said, adding that they couldn’t keep the name for long due to some trademark issues. 

“A company called ‘Speechify’ approached us saying that our name was similar to theirs and they have a trademark in the e-learning category,” Gupta said. The cofounders then changed the name to My Sivi (Speak, Interact, and Verbally Improve).

After taking care of the tiny hiccup, the startup turned to its users to figure out ways to offer them what was otherwise scant in the conversational AI learning market, human touch.

Meanwhile, explaining the overall functionality of the My Sivi app, Gupta said that one is required to interact with the app in English. The app then records the speech, triggering AI bot, ARYA, to give instant text-based feedback and corrections. The app also gives prompts about various topics that can be discussed. These topics include a variety of topics, including health and exercise, family and relationships, trip planning, etc. 

“Beyond this, we realised that a complete solution to the problem could only be achieved when AI works in tandem with peer-to-peer engagement. This is because the confidence generated from human interactions is crucial to extend one’s command over the language. Therefore, we extended My Sivi’s offerings with a feature that allows users to connect with other learners,” Gupta said. 

Decoding My Sivi’s Business 

The company launched the peer learning feature in March 2023. Since then, Gupta claims that the app has garnered heavy traction. The app has garnered over 1 Mn downloads since its launch. It enjoys a network of more than 200K monthly active users. 

Currently, the AI startup is operating on a freemium model. Users can use the app free of cost for 30 minutes daily. For unlimited access, the company charges INR 199 a week, INR 399 for one month, INR 699 for three months, and INR 1,399 for a year. 

Gupta said that its peer interaction feature is a hit among its users. The feature is also responsible for raking in new users. He added that the startup, so far, has been able to monetise the app enough to attain an annual revenue of over $250K on the back of its base of 30K paid users. 

Meanwhile, the cofounder sees generating $1 Mn in revenues by the end of this calendar year. For this, the cofounders have set their eyes on growing the user base to 5 Mn. 

As of now, the startup is working on introducing avatars to its chatbot teacher. Further, it is looking to introduce a text-based chat feature for social interactions. 

“With these improvements, we aim to spearhead our app for job seekers who might be having troubles in spoken English while embarking on their professional journeys,” Gupta said. Gupta also revealed that the company is in talks with investors to raise $2 Mn in the next two months. 

At a time when the Indian GenAI market is projected to surpass $17 Bn by 2030, growing from $1.1 Bn in 2023, an e-learning AI startup like My Sivi has enough headroom to grow. However, to expand and stay relevant in the ever-changing domain of tech, such ventures will have to constantly evolve and be quick in identifying real-world problems and offer solutions that actually work.  

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