Vera Scholvin: 21 Nov. 2022, 11:00 (IST)
Sylby: Pronunciation Training and Artificial Intelligence

Language: German

People with a heavy foreign language accent are often harder to understand, especially if their first language is phonetically very different from the foreign language they’re learning.

According to their own personal accounts, people are often underestimated, not taken seriously or discriminated against in even more drastic ways on account of their accents or pronunciation problems. This can be discouraging and cause considerable psychological strain, especially in professional contexts, though also in their private lives.

The Sylby app is a pocket-sized personal pronunciation coach that provides tutorials and tips, exercises and encouragement, as well as in-depth personalized feedback about specific sounds and structures to help language learners practise their pronunciation and make themselves understood. The app’s development incorporates the latest findings in linguistic research as well as state-of-the-art AI technologies in order to help language learners.

While many teachers are afraid AI might actually make them redundant, we’re convinced that traditional face-to-face language classes have something to offer that we don’t – and vice versa. So the idea is not to compete with language teachers, but to work hand in hand with them – and create new teaching jobs in this field with good working conditions. Current collaborative projects with the Goethe Lab and the Language Centre at the Free University (FU) of Berlin suggest that our vision is realistic and that this form of cooperation can be very productive.


Vera Scholvin did her PhD in the field of phonetics and phonology in foreign language acquisition, and has gained practical experience by teaching and learning languages herself. After working as a researcher and teaching at university, she felt it was important to use her knowledge and skills to develop a product that could be applied outside of academia in order to make people's day-to-day lives easier as well as to improve the public image of language teachers and linguists.