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Toko is now ranked third in the App Store for education and was admitted to the Y Combinator Winter Batch in 2022. With its intuitive design and adaptive learning algorithms, Toko is an ideal tool for anyone looking to improve their English speaking skills, regardless of their proficiency level.
As an international language, English enables you to unlock the door to the world. However, most Asian students can’t speak English even though they learn English from textbooks and teachers for years. With Toko, users can improve their speaking skills with AI. It works as a confidence boost, with AI can prepare you for conversations on different topics. Plus, practice makes perfect.
Toko, an AI-powered English learning app, has made its mark on the education industry. Founded by two MIT alumni, the app uses AI technology to offer a personalized learning experience that replaces human tutors, making it easier for learners to speak confidently in a foreign language. And Taiwan is a perfect launching pad for English learning business.
Starting in 2002, elementary schools in Taiwan teach English to first-graders. Now, kids even study English in their kindergarten. Not only in Taiwan, English learning has become an enormous market worldwide as 17% of the world's population speaks the language. Also boosted by the pandemic, the digital English language learning market is expected to be worth USD$ 7.18 billion by 2023, according to Market.us. It was during the COVID-19 outbreak when Jennifer Liu and Erica Du started Toko.
“During the pandemic, I spent more time connecting with family, but I struggled to talk to my grandma in Mandarin,” said Liu, a Taiwanese American who struggled with her Chinese speaking. Du, a Chinese American, also encountered similar issues and felt frustrated by the disconnect. Both studying computer science at MIT, Liu and Du have known each other for 10 years. ”One weekend, we hacked on a project together for fun,” Du said, “and the first version of Toko was born: AI Nainai (Grandma).”
As the first version of Toko’s product, AI Nainai helps mandarin learners better understand and engage in daily conversations. The simple chatbot was designed to help them with their mandarin conversations. Surprisingly, the tool soon gained great popularity among their friends, who also have the need to learn Mandarin. The idea of starting a startup has fermented.
Liu and Du both are experienced developers of educational technology and are dedicated to empowering people via technology. Early at MIT, Liu developed web-based mobile games that educate middle school students on biology topics. After graduation, she became an engineer of Quizlet, a web tool and a mobile app that boosts students learning through a number of study tools. She helped build new study modes from scratch at Quizlet, driving subscription growth through rapid experimentation.
As for Erica, she has worked on coding education since her study at MIT. She later got into Codecademy as a software engineer, an online interactive platform offering free coding classes. After wide attempts at educational technology, Liu and Du came to the point where they desired to explore entrepreneurship and built something of their own. Therefore Toko was founded in 2021, serving as a learning tool for language learners. As English learning demand is biggest compared to other languages, Toko focuses on the empowerment of English speaking skills.
“How do you know this app would work?” asks one of the Bnext reporters. “We tested it out,” answers Du with confidence, “we asked users to pay and they did!”
After Du and Liu decided to team up, the two engineers built the chatbot in the Facebook Messenger app at the drop of a hat. To test the market, they sent reservation requests to language exchange groups. As a result, thousands of messages flooded their phones, booking timeslots to chat. People were eager to try this innovative service, learning English speaking with their AI private tutor.
“We spent so much time just talking to users,” said Liu, “probably over a thousand.” Waking up at 5 a.m. to have meetings with people in Asia’s timezone, the team seized every opportunity to know users and their needs. Once, they also came up with a bold experiment, in which Du played the AI role. “I talked to seven people in a week, waking up before sunrise and pretending to be the AI,” Du said. Understanding users’ patterns and pain points of speaking English, Liu and Du kept updating their services using the Facebook messenger bot.
In March 2021, Toko has already served five to eight people a day with its prototype service. They soon faced UI limitations in their way of service optimization. Users want to have specific topics to chat about, while the Facebook Messenger app doesn’t support options on the UI. Moreover, learners have the need for checking the translation, transform texts into audio, and view grammar suggestions, which wouldn’t be available on the Facebook Messenger interface.
It was a signal for evolvement, as Liu put it when recalling the moment. Pivoted to a mobile app, Toko designs the service centered around user experience and demands. After downloading Toko, English learners can engage in short, realistic conversations with an AI and receive feedback on their grammar. With over 150 topics, learners can practice real-world scenarios ranging from small talk to workplace discussions.
In this fiercely competitive market, English learning apps are largely identical but with minor differences. To stand out from the crowd, Toko adopts different focuses. While many others emphasize mostly reading, writing and listening, Toko narrows down to English speaking skills, one thing at a time. Also, the AI tutor of Toko encourages users to complete a two-way communication, instead of dwelling on pronunciation and grammar.
The ingenuity lies in the learning modes, too. Liu and Du found that Taiwanese learners need more confidence in speaking English. To realize a low-pressure environment for learning English, Toko uses AI in replacement of human tutors. Through talking to AI, users are instructed to continue the conversation in English and form a sense of language. To ensure a smooth experience, Toko tackles unsolved NLP and automated speech recognition problems, including dynamic content generation and understanding accented English.
To establish its market share in the Taiwanese market, Toko participated in AppWorks Accelerator in 2021. Succeeding at boosting growth, Toko is now ranked No.3 in the App Store in the education category. In 2022, Toko was admitted to the Y Combinator Winter Batch, cementing its position as a major player in the Edtech space.
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