Learn English Podcast #42: Improving Pronunciation with AI-Human Technology

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Hi everyone and welcome to the link podcast with me Elle.

Today’s guest is Alexander Appel.

He is the co-founder of Lingo Mii, which is a hybrid AI-human English

pronunciation learning platform.

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Alexander, thank you for joining me.

How are you today?

I’m good.

Thank you for having me, but everything’s going fine.

Excellent.

Good.

And we were just talking before I hit record.

Uh, we’re both in this, uh, heat wave.

You are in Colorado, right?

Yep

Right now.

And how, how hot is it today for you?

I think it’s in the nineties, maybe touching a hundred.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Oh no, no, no, not good at all.

All…

I have two big, huge fluffy Japanese Akitas and they’re

like, I’m I’m not going outside.

I love those dogs.

They’re so, so cute.

Oh, that must be so tough.

They wearing huge fur jackets all the time.

Oh yeah.

A hundred percent.

Yeah.

Keeping mine inside.

I have a dog.

I walked her at eight o’clock this morning and she jumped in the

river and now she’s just collapsed.

Yeah 31 degrees.

Um, a little hot.

Yeah.

yeah, just a little bit.

Just a bit.

Yeah.

so, um, Alexander, as I mentioned, you are co-founder of Lingo Mii

and it’s an AI-human hybrid English pronunciation pronunciation system.

So tell us a little bit about how Lingo Mii.

Yeah.

So just for starters, we have two platforms on it.

We have one for our students, and then we have one for our teacher side.

For our students, all they have to do is just read the content,

speak to it, and then it’s going to grade them on intonation,

phonics, emotional and pausing.

Pausing is like, is the conversation actually going

or I’m going to be like hi….

you Know.

So it’s going to really kind of get a real world feeling and give the

students a grade on how the mouth and the tongue can have different

movements to help them better be understood by native English speakers.

For the teachers platform, the most difficulty that teachers have

today is actually getting talk time outside of the classroom.

So the way that they’re able to implement this is they can customize and input

their own content and it instantly gets translated into speaking activities.

It also has a scheduling feature and it also has, um, uh, uh, progress.

So what that means is that they can view and hear students to

help them prep for the next class

excellent.

Wow.

Um, and, and so I took a look, uh, around bit at Lingo Mii.

Do, do people who use the, um, system need to know the IPA, the

international phonetic alphabet.

So we, so yeah, so like, that’s always like a great question we come, come by.

The, the biggest thing with that is that we have learners who love it and they’re

just like, oh, that’s all I want to know.

And then we have our casual users that don’t really care.

So for that, I think it’s a good mix of that people who want to know

it or people who are interested.

It’s a good thing to just get a grasp of, especially for people who are

in, uh, Japan, because they always categorize things by Kanji or characters.

Right.

So they, I always tell all my students just think of an IPA as an character of

a sound and they grab it and they kind of think of it as a little bit easier.

But for the most part, it’s just easier to just know the mouth and the tongue

movements where you can see it at the beginning, middle or end of words.

Right.

I like that.

That’s a really good way of explaining it to Japanese students.

Yeah.

That’s like a kanji.

Okay.

Um…

definitely.

Yeah.

So then you spent some time, uh, teaching in Japan, correct?

Yes.

I did about three years and I was teaching, uh, in schools and privately.

Nice.

I did three years too teaching in Japan, but I…

when were you there?

I actually creeped you.

That’s not the right thing, I did my research and looked at

your LinkedIn and said 20…

just creeping

…around 20, just creeping around the internet.

So we got it.

2018 is it that you were there?

Yeah, so I started, uh, 2017 February and then I left about 2020

right before the pandemic in March.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Like literally the week I, I transferred through, uh, Korea.

And everyone’s in a hazmat suit and everyone’s just freaking out.

It was like, oh, okay, Hey, what’s going on?

Oh, oh, wow.

So you hit it like just as it was exploding then?

Yeah.

I was staying with my, one of my best friends in his family

and I was just joking around.

I’m like, oh, if I wanted a free seat on the train, I’ll just

cough cuz we didn’t know the seriousness of it back then, right?

And his dad just starts laughing and cracking up.

I’m like, what’s going on?

He’s like, I just came from Tokyo this morning.

That’s what I did the whole, uh, train, just cleared out.

I was like oh!

So what would’ve happened?

So you left before the lockdowns happened, but what would’ve

happened if you’d stayed?

Was it the case that if you were in Japan, you got to stay, but if you left, you

couldn’t come back in as a non-Japanese?

Yeah.

So I guess like, if I, if, if I didn’t leave, like I still had my

job and everything and they, they wanted me and, uh, actually, at

the time I had a modeling contract in Tokyo and acting contract.

So like, actually right when I hit my plane, my agent called me.

He’s like, we have like five auditions for you.

There’s uh, nothing I can do right now, but, um, so I could have kept

all that still going, and it was no problem, but I wanted to take a, a

stab at the business world and I wanted to do it with a Japanese company.

So I jumped in, I went into sports marketing, and then through just

the grapevine, I met my founder, Kyo Ueda, where we, we just kind of

sat in LA at a language exchange, a Japanese one, actually, and he was

the only person to speak Japanese.

So we just hit it off and we kept going over ideas and ideas and

ideas of why it was so difficult to learn languages, especially English

for non-native English speakers.

And we found out reading and writing wasn’t a problem.

We found out people who just wanted to listen didn’t have any problems, uh,

majority, but speaking was the difficulty.

And that’s where we came up with this idea of that we really wanted to give back.

And from a young age, my mother, she used to teach pronunciation.

She was actually my school nurse.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

So like I would hear her just teach people constantly.

And then I ended up starting teaching all my friends pronunciation

who were Japanese in college.

And then it went into all my…

when I was in Japan, that was my specialty.

So I just kind of kept going and going.

So it was kind of a blessing in disguise of me coming back in COVID.

Yeah.

Right, right.

And you’re usually based, you were saying before we, I hit record that you’re yeah.

Usually based out of LA, right?

Yeah.

We’re usually based in LA and we travel a lot back and forth, uh,

to Japan for just opportunities.

And I’ll be actually upcoming this month.

I’ll be doing a lot of traveling.

I’ll be probably in New York in September, California in August, and

then Texas the beginning of August.

Okay.

Wow.

So yeah, I just got a lot of, a lot of stuff going on.

Just no big deal.

Um, and how are you finding actually, I just wanna not related,

but how are you finding traveling?

I haven’t traveled for ages because I’ve heard it’s a nightmare, but how…

No, actually I’ve, I think it’s the best.

Like, well, like at the beginning I used to travel a lot during it.

Like right when COVID hit, I actually, uh, jumped on my motorcycle one cross country

and, you know, just did that for a while.

And then traveling on airlines it was like super cheap.

No one was on flights.

So it was like, no problem.

And now the price is starting to peak, but people are still kind

of, uh, a little worried, which is fine, but you usually get that

middle seat free and no one’s there.

So you kind of get the extension of it.

But the problem is that prices are going up.

Yeah.

Oh man.

Especially when I just came back from Tokyo two months ago, uh,

every single time I had that middle seat, so no problem.

That is…

what a score.

Yeah.

That’s fantastic.

As long as your luggage actually arrives with you, I guess is the, one of the

things that’s been going wrong a lot.

Oh really?

Anyway.

Yeah.

I didn’t know.

Anyway, that’s good that you haven’t experienced that.

Anyway back to, uh, pronunciation, English pronunciation.

So, um, you have this experience teaching in Japan.

what would you say are the, I guess just speaking from the Japanese native

speaker or mostly Japanese native speaker perspective, but what are

the most common issues that people have with English pronunciation?

Yeah, so like the, the biggest one is that it’s kind of everyone knows are R and Ls.

It’s the, the, the biggest one out there and there’s little tricks for that.

So for example, like when my mom used to teach this to get kids, she used

to focus on kids who had to speak better, that couldn’t roll their Rs.

Actually, my sister was one of ’em her name’s Ari.

And she would say “awee”.

Oh, that’s cute.

It was until my mom was like, I want you to speak correctly.

Uh, But, um, the funny thing was, is just, I always tell people, I’m like, if you

don’t wanna do the mouth that’s exercises, go to McDonald’s and go get a milkshake.

And they’re like, what?

I’m like, because when you drink through a straw, it’s going to be,

uh, such a high density it actually strengthens that tongue to curl.

Huh?

Okay.

So that’s the problem because with R one of the biggest problems

with that is that the tongue comes up right in front of the teeth.

It doesn’t touch it.

And then in the back it arcs.

Okay.

So it kind of looks like this.

And that’s a very, very hard movement for a lot of people.

So what I do is for, for mine, I go either drink a milkshake for a little