In today’s business landscape, chatbots are increasingly being employed for meeting organizations’ specific business requirements. From improving customer support services to ensuring improved customer engagement, chatbots handle a wide range of task with no hassles. Yet, besides addressing the tasks of businesses, we haven’t used this technology to its full potential for meeting our essential needs such as improving our language skills or vocabulary, and so on.
One company that is helping customers improve their language skills by optimizing AI (Artificial Intelligence) is Joyz Inc. Founded in October 2014 by Yoshiyuki Kakihara, Joyz Inc develops and manages the AI ??English conversation application “TerraTalk” with the vision of helping both businesses and kindergarten-high school students improve their language skills with its software technology. TerraTalk is a voice-enabled chat-bot, coupled with automatic assessment engine, which lets customers engage with English conversation lessons, with feedback on things like your pronunciation.
The company started out small in a B2C (business-to-consumer) but soon shifted to B2B (business-to-business) market. In particular, the domestic K-12 market (kindergarten – high school) has shown strong tenacious growth potential, due to educational reform around foreign language procurement in Japan. So far the growth has been stable for them. Joyz Inc expects to continue making appropriate investment in marketing, operations and technology, and above all, commitment to students’ success.
Talking with TerraTalk
Using speech recognition and dialogue processing technology, it is possible to gain an accurate understanding of a customer conversation and analyze the findings. TerraTalk’s curriculum is designed with careful research and quality control for each industry, occupation and hobby. On TerraTalk customers can focus on vocabulary that is useful for them, and choose specific roles and occupations to learn and practice new vocabulary by talking to the app. Also, TerraTalk exchanges audio with AI using familiar chat type interface. “Learning hints and dictionaries will only come out when necessary,” adds Kakihara, Founder of Joyz Inc.
Conversation with AI
It is safe even when it gets packed with conversation. When customers cannot say it well, they can use screen feedback, hints, and dictionary functions.
What TerraTalk Can Do
The application is customers’ conversation partner. By using this application, both students and employees eliminate the concerns about conversing with an individual. Moreover, if you are not able to speak well, it helps them by giving hints.
“You can listen to the sample dialogue first, if you’re not ready to start speaking right away. This helps you understand the conversation and teaches you what to say when is your turn,” says Kakihara. The hybrid drill consists of listening, pronunciation, and vocabulary questions that are randomly selected.
Helping Personal, Lone Learners
TerraTalk gives you a 30-day ‘Standard Plan’ trial period, which is for people who want to learn practical English. It automatically starts from the first day of using the app. If you subscribe in 30 days, you can continue to use the unlimited standard plan even after the trial expires or your account automatically becomes a free plan to enjoy free features. The ‘Standard Plan’ gives customers the benefits of unlimited conversation lessons. It recognizes your personal weak points in vocabulary, pronunciation, and listening and strengthens your memory by focusing on drill questions that are selected based on your mistake pattern analysis.
Learning the language
When training their employees on working with English, many businesses have resorted to generic business English courses. This can affect learning outcome since the lesson material is not directly relevant to their work. While it is possible for existing English schools to provide job specific courses, often the cost for hiring or training tutors who can handle specialized content can be expensive. TerraTalk solves this problem by creating job-specific, vocational courses with authentic dialogues. Scaling is extremely easy while relying on cloud and mobile. Since Japanese schools operate in classes of 30-40 students with no per-subject placement, TerraTalk serves these classes extremely well by dividing up its courses in finely calibrated levels.
Considering themselves a tech company, building a great design & engineering team has always been their top priority.
Empowering employees
Training is a great way to motivate and empower your existing employees. On top of providing an affordable solution for improving English communication skills, they are looking to change the way businesses discover talent. The investment in measuring English communication abilities will generate insight as to who is likely to develop more quickly than others, regardless of their current proficiency levels. This will allow businesses make calculated investment decisions for developing workforce, as well as new hires.
What the future holds
In the coming years, the company intends to take it product overseas with the help of right partners. “We have designed our product to go global from day one, with our Android app available internationally. We look to secure a major market share in Japanese K-12 market and attain significant heights internationally by 2021. And our mission is to change the way people look at borders –through democratizing second language acquisition,” concludes Kakihara.
QUOTES:
“TerraTalk customers can focus on vocabulary that is useful for them, and choose specific roles and occupations to learn and practice new vocabulary by talking to the app”
“Joyz Inc expects to continue making appropriate investment in marketing, operations and technology, and above all, commitment to students’ success”.
