# Personalized AI Language Education — with Andrew Hsu, Speak

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/latent-space-ai-engineer/personalized-ai-language-education-with-andrew-hsu-speak
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/latent-space-ai-engineer/personalized-ai-language-education-with-andrew-hsu-speak.md
Podcast: [Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/latent-space-ai-engineer)
Published: 2025-07-11T15:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.latent.space/p/personalized-ai-language-education
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/186621831/661bdfa367522289253180f433016280.mp3
Processing state: processed
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/latent-space-ai-engineer/episodes/personalized-ai-language-education-with-andrew-hsu-speak
Duration seconds: 3849

## Resource

Speak (https://speak.com) may not be very well known to native English speakers, but they have come from a slow start in 2016 to emerge as one of the favorite partners of OpenAI , with their Startup Fund leading and joining their Series B and C as one of the new AI-native unicorns, noting that “Speak has the potential to revolutionize not just language learning, but education broadly”. Today we speak with Speak’s CTO, Andrew Hsu , on the journey of building the “3rd generation” of language learning software (with Rosetta Stone being Gen 1, and Duolingo being Gen 2). Speak’s premise is that speech and language models can now do what was previously only possible with human tutors—provide fluent, responsive, and adaptive instruction—and this belief has shaped its product and company strategy since its early days. https://www.linkedin.com/in/adhsu/ https://speak.com One of the most interesting strategic decisions discussed in the episode is Speak’s early focus on South Korea. While counterintuitive for a San Francisco-based startup, the decision was influenced by a combination of market opportunity and founder proximity via a Korean first employee. South Korea’s intense demand for English fluency and a highly competitive education market made it a proving ground for a deeply AI-native product. By succeeding in a market saturated with human-based education solutions, Speak validated its model and built strong product-market fit before expanding to other Asian markets and eventually, globally. The arrival of Whisper and GPT-based LLMs in 2022 marked a turning point for Speak. Suddenly, capabilities that were once theoretical—real-time feedback, semantic understanding, conversational memory—became technically feasible. Speak didn’t pivot, but rather evolved into its second ph…

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## Transcript

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