Wordy is a brand new iOS app that provides a novel method to studying English. The app routinely interprets and defines unknown phrases when you watch your favourite motion pictures or TV reveals. Wordy has over 500,000 titles accessible, together with widespread collection corresponding to HBO’s “The Penguin” and the brand new Disney+ present, “Agatha All Along.”
Created by indie developer Sándor Bogyó, a 23-year-old from Budapest, the app was born out of his frustration with trying up unfamiliar phrases in his non-native language whereas watching reveals in English. His expertise with Language Reactor, a Chrome extension much like Wordy, led him to appreciate the necessity for a cellular app that might make it simpler to make use of his cellphone 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 cellphone’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’re within the episode and comply with alongside, scrolling down the transcript and highlighting sure phrases that could be tough for non-native English audio system. When a brand new phrase seems, you possibly can shortly look at your cellphone for the interpretation.
Moreover, there’s a abstract web page for every episode, permitting you to view each phrase without delay, that are sorted by problem stage: Proficiency English, Superior English, Higher-intermediate, Intermediate, Elementary, and Newbie. Wordy additionally offers the choice to avoid wasting phrases to your Library and observe them later utilizing digital flashcards.
Wordy makes use of a mix 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 knowledge, together with OpenSubtitles.com by way of their API, which he has discovered to offer probably the most correct and dependable subtitles.
Throughout our testing, we opened the app on our cellphone whereas watching Netflix’s hit TV present, “Wednesday” on a laptop computer. Wordy identified phrases like “plagued,” “nefarious,” and “séance,” that are extra refined vocabulary that newcomers simply studying the language could not know. We discovered that the translations have been correct and simple to grasp.
One caveat is that it’s at present solely accessible in English, whereas rival Language Reactor helps all the most important 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 prefer to maintain quality over rushing the process, so I’m taking the time to ensure each language integration meets my standards for accuracy and user experience,” he mentioned.
The app prices $2.99 monthly or $29.99 per yr. An Android model will launch in November.
