Young start-up entrepreneur and founder of ELSA Speak, Van Dinh Hong Vu, has announced that everyone can use the English study package on its ELSA PRO app for free for three months to improve their English skills amid the COVID-19 outbreak and school closure.

Young start-up entrepreneur and founder of ELSA Speak, Van Dinh Hong Vu, has announced that everyone can use the English study package on its ELSA PRO app for free for three months to improve their English skills amid the COVID-19 outbreak and school closure.

Vu said a few days after the launch of the freebie programme for students from grades 1 to 12 last week, ELSA received a positive response from hundreds of thousands of parents and students across the country and so has decided to expand it.

ELSA Speak uses proprietary speech technology with deep learning and AI to detect users’ pronunciation mistakes. It listens to the way language learners pronounce words and sentences to pinpoint errors and provide real-time feedback on pronunciation mistakes with specific suggestions on how to improve.

The app has more than seven million users in 101 countries, including over three million in Viet Nam.

“The ELSA team has decided to work at 200 per cent productivity at this time so that we can provide this learning opportunity to all Vietnamese,” Vu said.

Established in 2015 by Vu and Xavier Anguera, who has a doctorate in speech processing, ELSA(English Language Speech Assistant) has so far raised US$12 million from investors in Silicon Valley in the US and Asia. — VNS