Wordy's new app helps you be taught vocabulary whereas watching films and TV reveals | TechCrunch

Wordy is a brand new iOS app that provides a singular approach to studying English. The app routinely interprets and defines unknown phrases whilst you watch your favourite films or TV reveals. Wordy has over 500,000 titles out there, together with in style collection reminiscent of HBO’s “The Penguin” and the brand new Disney+ present, “Agatha All Alongside.”

Created by indie developer Sándor Bogyó, a 23-year-old from Budapest, the app was born out of his frustration with wanting up unfamiliar phrases in his non-native language whereas watching reveals in English. His expertise with Language Reactor, a Chrome extension just like Wordy, led him to understand the necessity for a cellular app that will make it simpler to make use of his telephone whereas watching TV or utilizing the pc.

When a person selects an episode from Wordy’s library, the AI analyzes the subtitles, then extracts and lemmatizes every phrase. Utilizing your telephone’s microphone, a customized speech recognition mannequin identifies spoken sentences from the audio coming from the TV or laptop. This helps the app discover the place you might be within the episode and comply with alongside, scrolling down the transcript and highlighting sure phrases which may be troublesome for non-native English audio system. When a brand new phrase seems, you may rapidly look at your telephone for the interpretation. 

Moreover, there’s a abstract web page for every episode, permitting you to view each phrase directly, that are sorted by problem stage: Proficiency English, Superior English, Higher-intermediate, Intermediate, Elementary, and Newbie. Wordy additionally gives the choice to save lots of phrases to your Library and observe them later utilizing digital flashcards.

Wordy makes use of a mixture of its proprietary and third-party AI fashions. Bogyó defined to TechCrunch that it leverages the biggest open film database, TMDB, for movie and collection information, together with OpenSubtitles.com through their API, which he has discovered to supply essentially the most correct and dependable subtitles. 

Throughout our testing, we opened the app on our telephone whereas watching Netflix’s hit TV present, “Wednesday” on a laptop computer. Wordy identified phrases like “plagued” and “sadism,” that are extra refined vocabulary that rookies simply studying the language might not know. We discovered that the translations had been correct and straightforward to know. 

One caveat is that it’s at present solely out there in English, whereas rival Language Reactor helps all the key languages. Bogyó assured us that he’s engaged on including extra languages. He plans to combine Spanish into the app in November, with French and German to comply with within the coming months.

“I favor to keep up high quality over speeding the method, so I’m taking the time to make sure every language integration meets my requirements for accuracy and person expertise,” he stated. 

The app prices $2.99 monthly or $29.99 per yr. An Android model will launch in November.