Edtech Insiders

Edtech, Hollywood and AI: Accent Training with Anada Lakra of BoldVoice

June 06, 2023 Alex Sarlin Season 6 Episode 8
Edtech Insiders
Edtech, Hollywood and AI: Accent Training with Anada Lakra of BoldVoice
Show Notes Transcript

Anada Lakra is the co-founder and CEO of BoldVoice. Her mission is to empower every non-native English speaker to fulfill their potential through confident English. . BoldVoice is an app that helps learners to improve their English speaking clarity and confidence through videos from Hollywood accent coaches and instant feedback from speech artificial intelligence.

Previously, Anada built and launched 5 products (1 IPO, 1 exit via acquisition) in both enterprise and consumer, across verticals including retail, entertainment, and recruiting. She was recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education, and holds a BA from Yale and MBA from Harvard Business School.

Recommended Resources:
How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do―And What It Says About You by Katherine D. Kinzler
Atomic Habits by James Clear



Alexander Sarlin:

Welcome to EdTech insiders where we speak with founders operators investors and thought leaders in the education technology industry and report on cutting edge news in this fast evolving field from around the globe. From AI to xr to K 12 to l&d, you'll find everything you need here on Ed Tech insiders. And if you liked the podcast, please give us a rating and a review so others can find it more easily. Anada Lakra is the co founder and CEO of BoldVoice. Her mission is to empower every non native English speaker to fulfill their potential through confident English. BoldVoice is an app that helps learners improve their English speaking clarity and confidence through videos from Hollywood accent coaches, and instant feedback from speech artificial intelligence, previously, not a built and launched five products with one IPO and one exit via acquisition in both enterprise and consumer and across verticals, including retail entertainment and recruiting. She was recognized as a Forbes 30 under 30 In education, and holds a BA from Yale and an MBA from Harvard Business School, Anada Lakra. Welcome to Ed Tech insiders.

Anada Lakra:

Thank you so much for having me.

Alexander Sarlin:

I am really excited to speak with you, I saw you give a pitch at the ASU GSB conference. And it was such an interesting pitch and such an interesting idea. And you have such an interesting history in the tech and entrepreneurial field. You're a serial entrepreneur, you've worked in different industries, you're working on this really unusual and very important, but unexpected part of the ed tech world. So tell us a little bit about your personal history, some of the things you've done and how it drove you to founding bold voice.

Anada Lakra:

BoldVoice is very much inspired by my own story and journey as an immigrant I was born and raised in Albania moved to the US for college. And it was an extremely unlikely shot at the time going from an Albanian public school and getting into Yale. But I took the shot. And you know, against all odds, it ended up working out. I'm a big believer in education as a great equalizer, and the one opens a lot of doors for for me personally and for a lot of other people. At the same time. When I moved to the US. That was the first time I was stepping foot in the country. And I noticed something about my communication and my English that I'd never realized before. I'd studied English at that time for almost a decade. So since I was young in school, but when it came to speaking it with native speakers in the US, I realized, while people aren't really understanding me, they're asking me to repeat myself, I realized for the first time I have an accent, it really started affecting, I would say my confidence, my ability to start speaking up. And then when he came later on to job interviews and those more kind of professional opportunities, I felt like my lack of communication, clarity and confidence was holding me back. At the time, I didn't really have the tools, I didn't know that accent coaching existed. And even if I did, it would have been way too expensive for me. But this was kind of always in the back of my mind. After college, I landed into consulting, but then very quickly pivoted into tech and found my space and my passion in product building and going from zero to one. So I did that at a bunch of companies. And then I went to Harvard business school to get my MBA. And then on a personal level, that's when I realized that what I had experienced myself in college was still happening to my international classmates. And I learned that one of my classmates had hired an accent coach to help them through this. This was an amazing solution, amazing resource. But again, extremely expensive, $200 an hour, if not more. So that's what got me thinking with my experience in product and technology, is there a way to take this amazing expertise that this coaches have, and through technology be able to solve this at scale for the millions, if not 1 billion plus people who need that polish in their communication and confidence in their accents. And essentially, that's how a bold voice was born.

Alexander Sarlin:

It's such an amazing sort of founder story. It's something you experienced personally, and even with all of these grand successful I mean, you have your personal background is so impressive. You're Forbes 30 under 30. And education you've you've mentioned, you know, Yale and Harvard MBA, you still are recognizing that this particular accent issue is holding people back and you're really dedicating yourself to it. So this idea of many people listening to this may not be familiar with it. I don't think I was particularly familiar with it before hearing your pitch, this idea of sort of accent modification for non native English speakers and how much of an effect it can have on people's lives. So I'd love to ask you you've mentioned finding your voice, job interviews, getting access to schooling and all sorts of things. Now that you've been out in the world you have All of these testimonials you have you have users from many, many countries who have done accent modification through bold voice. What does it do for your user base generally? And are there any particular stories that stick with you about how this has really made a huge effect on people personally,

Anada Lakra:

everybody learns English when they're very young in school, right? English is taught in public schools in over 100 countries around the world. And the problem doesn't tend to be writing or vocabulary or all those skills on paper, the problem ends up being that last mile of fluency is what we call it. So pronunciation is never really properly taught in schools. And the reason for that is that it's very difficult to teach it and very difficult to absorb it, especially if you learn it again from non native speakers who have an accent of their own. And what's really important is that that last mile of fluency can make or break your career potential, going from 80 to 90 to 100% command of English and confidence in English, in order to get those promotions, be able to advance and accelerate your career get to manage teams and become a leader. So it's the last mile of fluency, but also the highest ROI segment of that whole puzzle. That's the part that we're going after, the way we're helping people is on two fronts, the first one is being understood. And then the second piece of that is also confidence. And you asked about user stories, that's my favorite part about what we're building here is that we get to make an impact and users lives and immigrants lives. And they tell us about it. And those stories are always incredible. And what sticks with me the most one user put it in a really catchy way. She said bold voice has allowed me to be different and unique. But not because of my accent. I love that, which I thought was extremely well put, right? Because people have all these these these things to bring to the table, but they want don't want the accent to be the first thing that you notice about them. And then you assume certain things that may or may not be true about them. Then I've also heard from users that people used to look at me with this question mark in their eyes, and now they don't anymore, which I think is also really powerful. And then one user recently told us, I can now talk to Siri, and it understands me. Even things like that, it's the small things. And you know, all of the most of our users are working professionals. They are people who are very ambitious and very talented, and they are getting job interviews, they are able to land on better opportunities, get that promotion, in part, thanks to the training on bold voice. So it's really amazing that we're able to give that ROI and be a small part of the immigrants success. Yeah, so you see these

Alexander Sarlin:

intangible sort of intrinsic personal benefits of confidence and feeling heard and feeling like your voice is understood, and people trust you or can see your true personality. And these tangible benefits, getting the job getting the promotion getting a project lead, it's really exciting. A guest of mine recently reminded me of this amazing quote from Geoffrey Canada, who is the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone in New York, which said, if you want to know what works in education, do what the rich people do, right. And when you mentioned the accent coaching this idea of there's a profession of helping people modify their accents, and it's done in a variety of different contexts. When you go to bold voice, one of the first things you see is these amazing super professional coaches, doing videos that feel like they're right out of Hollywood, they're they're teaching you how to listen to yourself and pronounce different vowels and different dip thongs and things. And it's this is something that was cost prohibitive, but you've made it not cost prohibitive. And then you combine that with machine learning, to tell us a little bit about your approach. It's really innovative. And what is the experience of somebody, you know, logging into bold voice for the first time? How do you put together these two sides?

Anada Lakra:

You said it exactly right? We our approach was that we wanted to start with really analyzing what already works out there, which is this amazing, highly qualified coaches who can teach you to improve your speaking and your confidence in a very short amount of time, and to really help you get those results. And we started kind of understanding how that works, and figuring out how we can build a tech enabled experience that can do the same at scale, which is very different than saying, Oh, here's some cool AI. Let's just apply to it and see what happens, right? We've started with something that already works and figure it out. How can we kind of reverse engineer this, and through technology make it scalable? So what we landed with is this blended approach where you still have the person you still have the expert who's teaching you all the aspects of English pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, and then it is complemented by AI which gives you that instant feedback. And the reason that the first piece is very important is because this is a very human skill set. It's also a very physical skill set. The pronunciation really depends on how you move your mouth to make certain sounds. So it's really hard to teach it without observing and seeing how to do that. So we have this pre recorded kind of masterclass style videos from really Hollywood accent coaches who train actors and celebrities. So we've put this bite sized videos together where these experts break down, how do you make the American AR sound? How do you make all the different vowels in English that don't exist in your native language, and who really show you the intricate and the small mouth movements really, that make the difference between a sound that is exactly right, versus something that doesn't sound quite right. And all on demand in a video library. So it's extremely scalable from that viewpoint, which also allows us to offer it at a very accessible price point. Now, what's missing there is obviously without the coach in the room with you, you wouldn't be able to get the feedback, which is very important part of this learning experience, you have to just practice and practice and get feedback. So you know, whether you're doing it right and how you can improve. And that's where the machine learning and AI comes in. So what we've built is this model, you speak into the mic, and instantly, it evaluates your speech. And it gives you really precise sound by sound feedback on what you just said, just like a coach would if they were in the same room with you. By blending this kind of the latest in AI with his masterclass style videos, we've built an experience that feels as engaging and as interactive as working one on one with a coach. But again, in the comfort of your own home, you don't have to go anywhere, you don't have to schedule classes, you don't have to make an hour a week for this, it's really something that is built for busy professionals, and just 10 minutes a day, everyday can really build up a lot of progress.

Alexander Sarlin:

It's such an interesting combination. I love the approach of sort of breaking down what works so well in this one on one setting, and then saying what can we do to bring this to people at scale, and bring each of the pieces bring all of the components that we know add up to work, but they might come from completely different types of intelligence, your complaint, you're combining humans, their mouth shapes, and all the things that they do uniquely. And machine learning, which is very, very good at taking data and refining it and speech recognition and all of this stuff. So I really admire the approach and you're focusing on English learning on us accents, right. And you mentioned that over 100 countries in the world, people learn English in school, the British Council, which is one of the I think it's a nonprofit that studies this is estimated that at least 2 billion people on Earth are learning English. One analysis that I saw that was so interesting that about using search data to figure out what languages people were looking for, basically said that English was by far the most popular language being searched for in 98 countries, it was seven times more than the second most language. So you have seen this in action. You have users in 150 countries or more. It's absolutely global already. Where do you your your users primarily come from? I know that many of them are immigrants who have already landed in the US from other countries. Others may be learning from overseas. What geographical areas are you seeing people from and what kind of accents are just love to hear a little bit about your user base?

Anada Lakra:

Absolutely. And just to underscore the importance of English, it's the one of the only language in the world that has more non native speakers than he does native speakers. So it's very unique. And it's the one for better or worse, it's the one language that we've all kind of chosen and accepted as the Language of Business. So it's the one language where knowing it, it's not a nice to have, it's a must have for professional success. And in terms of our users, they're already over the all over the world, which is incredible. But primarily for now with we're focused on immigrants in the US because for them, the stakes are the highest, they're already here in this environment, they're already speaking English, very likely, both at work, and then in social settings. So they're very highly motivated to get into the next level. And if they do, then they can they know that they can really advance their careers and get all the opportunities that we already spoke about. But in the future, the future of bold voice is global. Our goal is to help talent all over the world succeed. There's not really any reason why somebody who is in the US should be getting better opportunities as someone who's not we know that talent is geographically distributed, and it's everywhere. And there used to be various barriers, physical and otherwise to allowing the best talent in the world to get the best opportunities. And now through technology, a lot of those barriers are going away, which is incredible. But another potential roadblock there is the level of communication and the level of English. So our hope is that we can also remove that roadblock from people. So that talent and opportunities can be truly global.

Alexander Sarlin:

As you mentioned, this global talent and how the globalization of work in so many different ways, especially post pandemic bold voice is currently a consumer app. It's a b2c model where individuals pay for access to it to pay a much less than they would for an accent coach, I can imagine that there's many different opportunities for companies to train people at scale to modify their accents. What opportunities are you seeing on this side is this part of both voices plan,

Anada Lakra:

we see huge opportunities on the b2b side and will helping companies upskill their talent companies know that in order to compete successfully in this globalized world and gain, and earn business, a big part of the skill set needed will be that professional level of English classes. We know lots of companies all over the world primarily serve the US based companies or other primarily English speaking companies or consumers. So there's lots of incentives both in capturing talent, but also in better serving clients and business on the b2b side to really work on upskilling your employees level of English. On top of that, for a lot of companies, it's also part of their missions, lots of companies, especially in the US hire immigrants, and part of their mission there is to help create social mobility. And we're already seeing a lot of inbound demand. And we're starting to serve that. And our secret sauce here is that by having started on the consumer side, we have focused very much on building an end product that the user wants and is engaged with and wants to use. So we're big believers that, you know, once you get the end user experience, right, then there's lots of opportunities to scale through employers and make any impact even bigger and more at scale.

Alexander Sarlin:

That pattern that you mentioned, right at the end, there are companies that start with a b2c model going directly to consumers or direct to consumer model. And they build, you know, really smooth user experiences and motivation systems and great interfaces. And really all the flows make sense for individuals. And then they say, oh, when we go and sell to businesses, our system is so much more thought out than many of the companies that started b2b. We've seen this in ed tech, many times lots of different pivots, from b2c to b2b, or extensions, from b2c to b2b. So I love hearing that from you. And me, I totally agree that focusing on individual customers sort of builds your muscle in terms of thinking about the end user, which sometimes companies that go directly to businesses don't always have to build that muscle. But I wanted to ask about one other part of this, which is that when you're mentioning this global talent, I mean, I remember right at the beginning of the war, in Ukraine, there was this movement of hire Ukrainian engineers, there had such incredible tech talent and all sorts of talent in Ukraine. And people were refugees suddenly, and really needed work. And there's also companies like Andela, which sources amazing tech talent in several African countries, and connects them to work in the US. And it's like, there's already this beginning of these really thoughtful and exciting movements to globalize talent. But what's tends to happen? I speak from a little bit of experience here. But I think, you know, generally, you have these incredibly talented people in different countries, they're there in different time zones, but also you sometimes they end up sort of seeming like a secondary part of the team, because they're overseas, you don't see them in the office. And because they have accents that you know, when they're in a stand up meeting, maybe people don't take them as seriously as they should. Or maybe don't, people don't give them additional work, because there's just this inherent bias and stereotype that sometimes people have against workers or colleagues with accents. I'd love to hear just this, you address this concept of, of bias. It's such an uncomfortable topic to talk about. But I know it's really core to what you're doing at both voice is making sure that everybody has the opportunity to you know, top quality work without being held back by others, stereotypes or biases.

Anada Lakra:

And the bias is real, right. It's something that I've experienced myself, it's something that's also been well studied and documented. So, for example, a study at a VL show that people in interviews get judged within three seconds of speaking. Three seconds means that you've by that point, you haven't said anything of substance yet. So it's clearly just how you sound and that is used to make all these assumptions about who you are and your socioeconomic status. And then there's a separate study out of Wharton, that shows that if you have a non native English accent, then you are 16% less likely to get promoted. And if you're an entrepreneur like me, 23% less likely to get funding as me McGraw Hill, if you feel like the odds are stacked against you, you're right. But at the same time, I think our purpose is not to say, okay, because there's bias, let's have you sounding 100%. American, that is not the goal. Nor is that really feasible or we think a good use of time, it's much more about going back to what I was saying earlier, two things always being understood. And always being confident, a lot of the bias actually comes from the fact that you trust less the people who have an accent, because your brain needs to work harder to understand them. So if you're removing the part of working harder to understand you and you're always clear in your speech, then that gets rid of a lot of the source of bias. And then when it comes to like the latter, the last part of the bias, potentially, that's all about confidence, that's all about you being able to speak up, and to be confident in who you are. And to be able to own a room and reverse some of those biases by just standing up for yourself. And a lot of actually, what we teach in our method is that we are teaching you the American accent, and we're helping you acquire that. But at the same time, we're also teaching you that everybody has an accent, even if you're American, you have an accent. So it's not about perfection. It's about being confident being understood, and being able to stand up for yourself. And by the way, what if you have an accent, it means you're bilingual, it means that you probably speak more languages, at least bilingual, right? more languages than the person in front of you. It's funny, it's like we are a language proficiency app. But almost to a similar extent, we're also motivation app confidence app for our

Alexander Sarlin:

users. I love the way you break that down. And there's a lot of different aspects to how people are perceived in the workplace and how they feel about themselves. So it's really incredible to address these biases from both sides. Let's talk about AI. That's the other part of your platform, you use AI, as you said, to give users instant feedback on their pronunciation. That's the other part of the coaching that they can get through video, which means you have speech recognition. And your tech is really very specific and being able to tell any nuances about pronunciations and different types of pronunciations and what varies about them. This is such a cool and really intriguing use of speech recognition. I'd love to hear a little bit about how it works don't have to get into technical detail. But I'd love to hear how you got the existing AI toolkit to do this specific and really powerful use case.

Anada Lakra:

We've invested a lot in this area, because again, it's very important for the feedback here to be accurate and precise. Because at this point, we're not talking about early language learning where it's like, okay, you got this mostly right, or you got this mostly wrong. It's really about the precision in the literal sounds that you make that can transform potentially, the listeners ability to perceive that sound as a kind of standard pronunciation, the feedback needs to be accurate and needs to be at an on a sound by sound level. Essentially, what happens from the user experience perspective is that we offer you the ability to speak coche curated words, phrases, sentences, and even conversations. And as you speak, as you tap the mic, you record your voice. And then instantly, you get a score breakdown of every single sound that you made, then once you narrow down which sound you're struggling with. And we'll offer you additional tools, short videos and other types of hints and helpful tips for you to master that sound as you go. So it's really precise, and it's instantaneous, and it creates that gamified and interactive learning experience, it's really important for our users. And by the way, as more as we get more and more users, we're also getting better and better at scoring people more accurately as we go because the data mode that we've been creating is also helping us constantly improve our model, I will not claim that the technology is as precise as you know, the very fine tuned year of one of our Hollywood coaches. But I'm optimistic that as we keep working on this and keep improving, eventually we'll get

Alexander Sarlin:

there. Nothing's ever done when it comes to AI in the early innings of everything. But you've been using AI in your product for a while, you know since before the AI explosion in November of 2022. So when you look forward when you sort of extrapolate out some of the future use cases of AI in edtech. But specifically in your vision of bold voice. Clearly it will get better and better as you say at identifying the scores and being able to give people feedback that is very powerful. And that's a great use case. Do you see other ways in which AI might support bold voices vision in the future?

Anada Lakra:

Absolutely. I'm super excited about everything that's been happening recently around generative AI and how we can help support this idea of one on one teaching and learning in a scalable way. And now we're kind of going back to the point of access, which is for people who can afford it, or they've been doing one on one learning for a while, because it's the most effective way to learn. But we also know that the vast majority of people cannot afford to have a one on one coach. And this extends in all areas of life, not just practicing English. But with AI, we are getting to the point where through the model that we're using, which is a speech recognition model, and overlaying that with some of the conversational AI, where you can have an adaptive, personalized conversation, I'm super excited about what this means for in the future, everyone to have a personal one on one coach for any area of their life professional or not, that they want to improve in. And when it comes to both voice, specifically around English learning, there's very natural extension in what we're doing today, in adapting the latest in AI to offer more conversational experience. For example, I'm a data scientist, I'm applying for my first job, I want to have a mock job interview. And you can go voice and do that, and get to practice in exactly what you want, while also getting the same accurate feedback that we give you today on the scripted side of things. So I'm super excited about what that means for being able to meet users where they are and hyper personalize the learning experience to their needs and interests.

Alexander Sarlin:

That is a very, very exciting vision. And you know, as I hear you speak about it the way you've decomposed the learning experience as having this sort of back and forth where you're getting feedback on anything you say, and then you're getting video or some kind of it could be interactive, but on the other side, or a person being able to provide content, it strikes me that this could be used in so many ways that the example you just gave about the data science interview, that could work even if you're just trying to learn how to do your first interview at the accent is a great use case for it. But it's not the only one can you interview prep sites and boot camps should be using that right now. It's a really exciting and you can imagine that idea of an AI, conversational tutor that can give you feedback on everything you're saying or even doing and can provide that sort of one on one feeling as a person, either a real person or a virtual person feels like a really good vector towards what the future of ad tech might look like.

Anada Lakra:

Again, I think it all comes down to the fact that before we were limited by content, so for each individual use case, you would have to produce different content. And now with generative AI, it's much much easier to generate this content, so that you can offer the exact personalized experience and type of content to everyone who needs it. And you layered on with also again, the speech recognition that can detect what we're doing today, which is the sounds and the pronunciation mistakes, but can also in the future detect small grammar mistakes or small things like filler words, or, you know, in the future, it can also say that, hey, the language you chose was maybe not as confident as it could have been. Here's an example of how you could have rephrased it, there's so many opportunities to keep layering it on and make it even more valuable to people.

Alexander Sarlin:

I love it. And it's all baked in there in the name of your company, right bold voice. How do you how do you build your own personal voice and get the kind of feedback you need to continue to gain that confidence continue to gain that ability to communicate in a way that's convincing clear really works for everyone in the conversation. It's a really exciting Yeah, you could use it for vocabulary you could use it for, for grammar, you could use it for content knowledge. I mean, you could do a dissertation defense with a model like this, right? It's really, really interesting stuff. So let me ask you just one more question about bold voice. And then we can do our wrap up. But I mean, if people are not googling bold voice or downloading it on the app store right now, I think you're missing out because this is a really exciting vision of the future of edtech and in 150 countries already. But when you look forward and you see the set of users, you're already influencing that you're already helping build that confidence or be able to talk to Siri, are all of those things? Do you think there's going to be a sort of pay it forward model where some of these folks like yourself, you'd look back and say, Wow, I got all these amazing opportunities through education. But this accent situation was really a weird thing that sort of held me back. Do you see that you're sort of creating a whole community of people who may look back in a few years and say that accent modification really changed my life and I'm going to continue To change other people's lives, I'd love to hear, do you get any of that feedback from your users?

Anada Lakra:

Absolutely. First of all, we have a very engaged community of people who use the app, but also talk to each other, and help each other and give each other advice and support, and post their little videos and get feedback from others if there's something they're struggling with. So we're already seeing this community forum, we're also working in a space that it's a pretty white space, there isn't much happening here. And I think there's a lot of kind of pent up desire to connect with people who have faced kind of the same, the same struggles and improve and learn together. So I'm also excited about the social component of this experience. But more than the what you just shared about inspiring people to also pay it forward. Even beyond this, I've already even had some conversations with people in our community are excited about what we're building, and also our aspiring entrepreneurs, which by the way immigrants make for excellent entrepreneurs, because immigration in itself is a form of entrepreneurship. So we've had to I've had some conversations just made the time, you know, 30 minutes for half a user interview and half to just hear people's ideas on what they want to build. So it's been amazing that this product has also inspired people to find more confidence in themselves to maybe become entrepreneurs and go out there and build something of their own.

Alexander Sarlin:

Amazing, and hopefully, they can break down that 23% less likely to get funded, you know, we change those stats over time that it's really, it's a wonderful thing to hear that the community is continuing continuing to build and create even more new ideas. Let's talk about the most exciting trends. This is the questions we end the interviews on, I know we could talk a lot more, what is the most exciting trend and we can't say AI here just because it's on everybody's mind, what else are you seeing in the landscape, from your perspective, add bold voice as an entrepreneur, that you think our listeners, our ad tech enthusiast listeners should keep an eye on?

Anada Lakra:

Hmm, if I can say I definitely limits my options a little bit, but I will link it to something that's AI enabled, which is personalization, and the ability to create not just generic horizontal solutions, but go deep and create very valuable solutions in vertical markets. And that's in general, not just in tech, but in tech specifically, right, this problem that we're tackling, it's a pretty specific vertical problem for immigrants and non native speakers. And we're going by going really deeply into that through AI, now we're able to again, offer a very valuable solution at scale. That is, because we're so focused on the specific end user can be so much more valuable than if we just created a generic speech coaching tool. So I'm very excited about the ability for through AI. Yes. But to really dive into this vertical point solutions and through personalization, offer a much more elevated and user experience than we've ever been able to before.

Alexander Sarlin:

That's a it's a great answer. And I think well done getting AI in there a little bit, but I, you know, I think it is people have talked about personalized learning and you know, hyper differentiated targeted learning for years before AI existed. But I really agree we are in a new world of personalization. I mean, we might see personalized college majors. Soon, we might see personalized textbooks, we could see within bold voice you were mentioning the idea of you know, specialized vocabulary, if you're an immigrant to the US who works in transportation management, you have a whole set of things that you talk about that people probably don't have to pronounce most people but you can practice them on bold voice and get really specific feedback. Personalization is going to mean a whole different thing going forward. So I am really happy to hear that you're, you're on it. And I couldn't agree more. What is a resource that you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into the topics we discussed today that can be book, a blog, a newsletter, Twitter feed person to connect with? What would you recommend,

Anada Lakra:

I'll keep this non AI related, since a lot of the conversation has been around that on the topic of what we're building here and helping people find their most confident voice. There's a book that I recommend, and the title is how you say it, and why you talk the way you do by Katherine Kinsler. I think it's a great book that helps kind of go into why we speak the way we do and really break down those potential biases that we all have. And I think it's an interesting book to read both of your non native speaker but also if you're a native speaker, eventually a lot of the work that we hope to do is to help also native speakers kind of understand their privilege that they were just born into speaking English as their native language, and they don't have to try as hard as other people potentially to get there. So eventually, what we hope to do is for both voice also help, especially once we do the b2b side that we talked about Help also create that more inclusive workplace, which includes helping on both sides, both the non native speakers and the native speakers. So anyway, that is a is a great book around more speech psychology. And then a second book a little bit restless related exactly to speech, but still something that shapes a lot of how we've created the product experience on bold voice is a book called atomic habits by James clear, it was a very successful book. So people have might have heard of it already. But the way it's related is that it's really those small daily habits that can build a lot of progress much more so than just one off efforts here in there. Specifically, the Bolshoi's product experience, as I was mentioning, is in this atomic 10 minutes a day, every day, create a routine and a habit that can really transform your life and really lead to a lot of professional development. So I think it's a really interesting book and psychology that applies to a lot of professional and personal development. well beyond just speech.

Alexander Sarlin:

Excellent. So we will put links to both of those resources as always in the show notes for this episode. That's how you say it by Katherine Kinsler. Did I get that right? That's right. And atomic habits by James clear, which is Yeah, has changed a lot of lives, because it's a very powerful method. Really, really a pleasure speaking with you today and not a lot. Keira, co founder and CEO of bold voice med empowers every non native English speaker to fulfill their potential through confident English. Really fascinating conversation and I sorry to limit your AI I know we could talk about AI probably for another for another week. But uh, it's really, really a pleasure to speak with you. Thanks for being with us here on at Tech insiders.

Anada Lakra:

Thank you so much for having me. Alex was a pleasure.

Alexander Sarlin:

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