SESP junior Katia Shek is no stranger to start-ups. She ran through two previous ideas, both inspired by her love for education, before landing on Lex — a product that uses artificial intelligence to help students learn languages through phone calls.
“You just don’t have enough of that opportunity, even in class,” Shek said.
With Lex, students dial a saved contact to practice Chinese, Spanish or French with conversational AI. Shek said Lex offers an “active learning experience” beyond what conversing with ChatGPT can provide. Lex allows users to pick up where they last left off — whether with vocabulary or grammar structures — from the last time they dialed the number.
The idea for Lex began in early April, according to Shek. Currently, the program is in its private beta-testing phase.
Shek’s roommate, McCormick junior Grace Shao, has tested the program herself.
“I actually hadn’t used the voice feature on any of the chat models before, and I was surprised by how good it was,” Shao said. “It was fully able to converse with me in a different language and then also teach me vocabulary.”
Shek and Shao met through their peer adviser group and the pair have stayed friends since then. Shao said she has witnessed Shek persevere through many challenges as her startup ideas have evolved over the last year.
Shek’s original startup idea, WizLab, used AI to help teachers tailor worksheets across all subjects to different learning levels. With this concept, Shek participated in The Garage’s Jumpstart program last summer, and also received a National Science Foundation grant, among other funding and awards. Yet, she and her team soon faced problems with the scope of the work, so Shek pivoted her idea.
“If you think about it deeper, what does it mean to make something more difficult? What does it mean to make something more accessible?” Shek said. “I just don’t think we were the right ones to tackle it for every single subject.”
Her next idea entailed creating an all-in-one lesson program for teaching a language, from creating lesson plans to crafting presentation slides. This idea originated from Shek’s time teaching English to students in Morocco while studying abroad. Again, however, Shek said the scope of the startup was “kind of insane.”
But with Lex, she said the process has proven much more manageable. Shek said her and her six-person team got the prototype up and running within one day because of the vast amount of AI tools available.
Elizabeth Wang, a senior at Carnegie Mellon University, works on design and user experience for Lex. She joined Shek’s team last summer, when the idea was still WizLab.
“Right now we’re delving into the user experience side of things … to kind of see more about how (people’s) language learning processes work, and then also specifically thinking more about what challenges they face, especially when it comes to them learning how to speak a specific language,” Wang said.
Shek said she is excited about the convenience her product offers, especially for members of Gen Z. The phone call style allows for hands-free learning, making it accessible while driving or walking to class, she added.
“I want people to just dial it organically,” Shek said. “I want them to be excited to practice and to come back and tell me, ‘I feel myself getting more confident.’”
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