Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Monday, December 1st.

Today on Forbes, this startup is racing Duolingo to replace human language tutors with AI.

On a trip to Seoul in 2018, Connorswick drove past what looked like normal skyscrapers,

but he soon learned they were filled with classrooms,

dedicated to teaching English,

and ads for such classes were plastered across taxidops and billboards.

It hit him.

The biggest market for his then-Nacent language learning app,

Speak, was here, not Silicon Valley, where his headquarters were

located. He recalls, quote, English language learning there was like an obsession. There was such

latent demand. But the language training on offer was often ineffective. Students spent

hours learning the basics from textbooks and pre-recorded videos,

overseen by instructors who lacked fluency. The antiquated methods emphasized learning grammar and

vocabulary over actually speaking out loud. Zwick said, quote, everything was so academic,

and there was this fear of making mistakes.

For Zwick, Sol's bustling downtown and its endless demand for English language instruction was both inspiration and opportunity, to build a true AI tutor that could replace the human

language tutor and offer a judgment-free space for learners to make and correct mistakes while speaking

another language. The promise, he said, was, quote, no one's going to know if you said something

embarrassing. Today, speak has a voice-based AI coach that role-plays scenarios like ordering

drinks at a restaurant, asking for directions to a tourist spot,

or making small talk with a classmate to help practice speaking a new language in real-world situations.

Built primarily on OpenAI's models, the goal is to encourage users to practice

...