November Update

4 min readDec 3, 2019

Dear backers,

Here’s what we’ve been working on in November. We made big progress on our voice AI software and Lily’s teaching system is getting better.

Voice Synthesis progress

Last month, we shared some videos of our work on synthesizing Lily’s voice. We had a hard time adjusting the speed of her voice as you saw in this previous video. This month, we solved this problem, check this demo:

November progress on voice speed, compared to October’s.

All the voices you hear in our videos are trained and synthesized in-house on our servers.

Echo Cancellation progress

We also improved our noise cancellation. Lily can hear your voice even when she’s playing music/speaking loud. Without echo cancellation, the accuracy of our speech recognition drops 50% when Lily is playing at maximum volume. Watch this video, the team did an impressive job at cancelling music:

This is what Lily hears after the noise cancelling process.

Collecting speech data

Last month, we showed you a prototype of the cheaper prototype we developed for data collection. Here’s a video of this product assembled (it’s an ugly product but very effective to collect data):

Lily’s brother that helps us collect voice data.

We’re now accelerating our Speech Recognition data collection program.

Implementing Lily’s different features

We keep implementing Lily’s core teaching modules. Here’s a sneak peek of Lily’s Pinyin module:

Lily’s new pinyin feature.

Lily’s LED UI/UX experience

We’ve also improved Lily’s display experience. When you are interacting with Lily with your voice or with the touch panel, Lily’s LEDs will start animating so that you have visual feedback. You can see all the animations in the following video:

Lily’s LED user experience and demonstration.

Lily’s teaching content

Lots of backers have asked about our teaching content. In our ad video, we couldn’t go much into details. Here are some more elements about Lily’s teaching content.

Spoken/daily Chinese

Lily focuses on spoken Chinese more than academic Chinese. Example:

Comparison between textbook-based formal Chinese and spoken Chinese.

Covers HSK curriculum

Lily covers the full spectrum of the HSK 1 to 6. For example for HSK 1, Lily covers vocabulary topics like family, directions, food, time, transportation, weather, numbers, etc… Lily also covers lots of grammar points like personal pronouns, interrogation, exclamation, negation, past/future tense, passive form, etc…

Personalized conversations

Unlike language books or apps, one of Lily’s strengths is that she can personalize her lessons just for you. Prior to some lessons, we will ask you a few questions through our app and based on your answers, Lily’s AI will build a customized conversation for you. Check this video for a simple example:

Lily’s personalized conversations depending on her user.

Full-fledged lessons

Lily’s teaching content is organized into full-fledged lessons with conversation practice, grammar exercises, vocabulary exercises, pronunciation/listening exercises and cultural points. All the exercises are voice-controlled, sometimes coupled with the screen of your app. We work with teachers to back Lily’s voice-controlled teaching experience with an academic curriculum.

Training program

Lily’s teaching system is goal-oriented. When you start using Lily, you’ll be asked to choose a training program that will be your long term goal (for ex: reaching HSK1 level within 6 months). Based on this goal, Lily will schedule the right lessons for you on a weekly timeline.

Lily’s goal-oriented study plans (note: this is not everything!).

Track your progress

Through Lily’s app, you’ll have access to personalized feedback to track your progress, for example: pointing out the words you often mispronounce or vocabulary you tend to forget. In addition, there will be an exam after each lesson and you can’t unlock the next lesson until you pass the exam. You’ll be able to see your progress through different charts and if you’re on track with the training program Lily scheduled for you.

Timeline

Testing Lily’s packaging

We’ve printed and tested different packaging based on the 3D model we shared on our previous update. We’re trying to down cost the packaging — no fancy packaging — just something clean and robust enough so that it can protect Lily during the transportation. We want to use the money on the product. Here are some photos of our tests:

Lily sitting comfortably in her new box.

As we come closer to the 1st batch of shipping, the team is under more work and more pressure. There are so many other things that we’re working on that we don’t tell. We’re also paying a lot of money to our suppliers for the materials needed to assemble Lily, there’s no going back. We’ve been holding our breath for almost a year now — sometimes we’re under the water with all the developments — but we’ll hold our breath until every one of you receives a Lily.

Thanks,

Jie and the Maybe team