Startup invested in by FPT Ventures won SXSWedu

Elsa - A mobile application for English invested in by FPT Ventures beat 1,200 companies to take home first prize at at the SXSWedu 2016 Launch Startup Competition.in USA.

The SXSWedu Launch startup competition serves as an unparalleled opportunity for early stage startups in the education space to highlight their products and services in front of a panel of judges and a live audience. The fifth annual Launch competition took place at SXSWedu, March 7-10, in Austin, Texas.

ELSA is a mobile app designed to assist language learners in improving English pronunciation and reduce their accent. Users can play pronunciation games or read aloud from different dialogues in various topics such as love, profession, and travel, with over 30 games and 3,000 common words or phrases currently available.

Learners can also speak any word or phrase in English of their choice to the phone and ELSA can provide automated speech analysis to pinpoint the problem with their pronunciation.

The fun and appealing games help learners get higher marks for good pronunciation and reach higher levels, then becoming more confident with speaking English and well-prepared for TOEFL, TOEIC, IELTS as well as daily situations. Especially, players can check their pronunciation of any word with the feature of Ask Elsa Now.

ELSA used in-house speech recognition, automated feedback, and deep learning technology and initially aimed at users in Vietnam. The leading experts on linguistics analyzed the pronunciation problems and suggested the most effective way to practice. The method of Elsa is particularly suited to the Vietnamese.

More than 10% of users played all of the levels. Many of them said that it was the app they asked for long time ago. Regular users evaluated that Elsa helped them make progress and bring their pronunciation closer to that of native speakers.  ELSA was initially aimed at users in Vietnam, but its user base has expanded to include Eastern European and American users, as well as Vietnamese expats living in the US.

The R&D team helped ELSA with the proprietary. CTO Xavier Anguera - one of the leading experts on speech recognition technology was the co-author of more than 60 articles with more than 15 years of experience. Dr. Vu Duy Thuc - a leading expert in the AI field and Professor Daniel Povey – the founder of Kaldi are also advisers of ELSA.

The two co-founders Van Dinh Hong Vu and Ngo Thuy Ngoc Tu found that although many Vietnamese were well-educated and skillful, they got fewer promotion opportunities than natives because of their English pronunciation.

In December, after the trial version was posted in Google Play Store, Elsa has over 7,000 downloads.  Only 2 days after the launch, there have been more than 2,000 downloads of the version for iOS. Users improved 40% of their scores within 3 weeks.

FPT Ventures and two other personal investors have invested into ELSA.