We’re thrilled to announce the beta launch of Beepboop Stories, a new feature designed to make Spanish learning more engaging, interactive, and personalized. Built with cutting-edge AI, Beepboop Stories combines storytelling, voice technology, and customizable learning tools to improve listening comprehension skills while reinforcing what is learned in the Drill of the Week.

Step Into the World of Atlangatepec

Atlangatepec is a vibrant, fictional village in Mexico where Spanish learning meets adventure. The Beepboop team crafted this rich world as the setting for our stories, with cultural details, intriguing characters, and dynamic narratives. Students follow and influence Maria’s journey as she navigates her first days at TechNova, a powerful tech company building its sprawling Latin American headquarters in Atlangatepec.

The stories are designed to reinforce in-class learning, seamlessly incorporating this week’s Drill of the Week vocabulary into the dialogs. You’ll practice phrases in context while immersing yourself in the drama and culture of this fictional world.

Ready to Try Beepboop Stories?

This feature is exclusively available to Pro Students. Don’t miss the chance to beta test and immerse yourself in this innovative Spanish learning experience.

🎧 Try Beepboop Stories (Pros Only)

🚀 Become a Pro

🗣️ Join a free Spansih Drill (all students welcome)

We develop AI to strengthen our community

With the launch of Beepboop Stories: Atlangatepec, we’ve built a vibrant, AI-powered world where students drive storylines, interact with each other's narratives, and uncover mysteries. Atlangatepec fosters collaboration and cultural discovery, blending personalized language practice with a dynamic, shared experience.

This virtual AI world connects students’ creative input with real-world discussions in live classes, using its evolving events as springboards for Spanish lessons and deeper cultural understanding. By combining AI-driven customization with community-focused storytelling, we’re transforming language learning into an immersive and meaningful journey.

What’s New in V0.0.0?

Dec 9, 2024

Dynamic Storytelling with Realistic AI Voices

Dialogs come alive with Google’s Text-to-Speech AI, delivering natural, engaging narrations and conversations that make you feel like you’re part of the story.

Story Generation Powered by GPT-4

We leveraged ChatGPT-4 AI tools to craft compelling, adaptive dialogs tailored to reinforce learning. These stories are woven into the fabric of Atlangatepec, blending cultural richness with practical language practice.

Audio Control for an Enhanced Experience

Pause, play, and seek through audio at your own pace, giving you the freedom to learn on your terms.

Customizable Language Translations

Adjust how much English is included in the dialogs to match your proficiency. Choose from:

• No translations.

• Partial sentence translations for key phrases.

• Full sentence translations to Spanish.

Interactive Comprehension Quizzes

Test your understanding with multiple-choice questions tied directly to the story. To unlock your answers, you’ll provide valuable feedback to help us improve the experience.

What’s New in V0.1.0?

Dec 10, 2024

More Dependable Realistic AI Voices

• Switched to Google Neural2 voices, providing smoother and more natural narrations while avoiding API limits that were preventing audio playback in the earlier version.

Enhanced Audio Controls

• Added fast forward/rewind (3s) buttons and playback speed control, letting you tailor the audio experience to your preferences.

• Removed the stop button to simplify the interface.

Improved Learning Features

• Introduced a version history tracker so you can follow how your feedback is shaping updates.

• Added a Related Drill Topic link for further practice tied to story content.

Mobile Optimization

• Enhanced readability and usability on mobile devices, ensuring a seamless experience across platforms.

What’s New in V0.2.0?

Dec 11, 2024

Streamlined Navigation and Consistency

• Added a standard header logo, back button, and menu for smoother navigation.

• Standardized slider bars for adjusting language mix, ensuring a consistent experience across the app.

Bug Fixes

• Resolved an alignment issue with the "Take Quiz" button that caused it to load improperly on the left.

🎧 Try Beepboop Stories Now (Pros Only)

🚀 Become a Pro

🗣️ Join a free Spansih Drill (all students welcome)

At Beepboop, we’re constantly evolving to make the learning environment more efficient and user-friendly. In our latest update to the Teach App, we’ve expanded the functionality of our join sound feature, helping our Drill Instructors stay on top of who is joining their Drills.

Why the Update? Originally, the join sound was designed to alert Drill Instructors when the first student entered a class, allowing them to multitask—handling other tasks in a different browser tab—without missing the arrival of their first student. This feature was a hit, helping instructors make the most of their time while waiting for classes to fill. Instructors gave us the feedback that they would also like to hear the join sound each time a student joined so they wouldn’t miss late joining Pros or new students. .

How It Works: Now, the join sound will play whenever any student—free or paid—joins a class. Importantly, we’ve also added the option for instructors to mute the join sound. This provides flexibility in larger classes where multiple students might join, preventing distractions and helping instructors stay focused.

Navigating the Technical Challenges: Updating the join sound logic was more than just a simple code tweak. Testing this feature in our local and staging environments was complex because it required simulating multiple students joining at different times. In a live environment, you could have several students arriving simultaneously, or the system could face unusual spikes that are difficult to predict in controlled testing. To address this, we created four test accounts, logging them in at different times and sequences, and thoroughly tested the feature to ensure it performed as expected.

Better Experience for Students and Instructors: With this update, we’re ensuring that Drill Instructors can manage their time more effectively and that classes start promptly when new or pro students are ready. Students benefit from quick responses, reduced wait times, and a smoother, more supportive classroom experience from the moment they join.

Beepboop continues to refine its tools to adapt to the needs of instructors and students alike, fostering an environment that is efficient, intuitive, and enjoyable for all users.

At Beepboop, we're committed to improving the learning experience. That’s why we’ve introduced a beep notification that alerts Drill Instructors whenever the first student joins a class.

Why We Implemented It:
Since our Drills run nearly continuously throughout the day, with Drill Instructors often multitasking—doing other non-teaching Beepboop work in another browser tab while waiting for students—it’s crucial that they know the moment a student arrives. This feature ensures that no student goes unnoticed or feels ignored.

How It Works:
The beep only sounds when the number of students in the class goes from zero to one, alerting the Drill Instructor that someone has joined. If a second student joins, it won’t beep again. However, if all students leave during a class—a common occurrence as some prefer shorter interactions—and then another student joins, the beep will sound again.

Better Experience for Students:
This feature helps teachers promptly acknowledge students, reducing any anxiety about speaking up and ensuring they feel supported from the moment they join the class.

In the video above, watch our Board Chairperson and AI Engineer, Devon Saliga, demo the new “Beep” feature.

Not a Pro yet? Upgrade now!

Boost your Spanish confidence with daily practice and accountability from compassionate human partners. Become a Pro today and see the difference!

Become a Pro

• Beepboop Drill Instructors used to have to do an inconvenient workaround every time they wanted to see which students were going to be in their class. Now the information is conveniently available on the first screen the Drill Instructors see when they login to teach. This project lays the groundwork for displaying more info about students to help Drill Instructors better prepare for class and prepare a more personalized learning experience.

• Beepboop Drill Instructor Admins can now change info about students without making manual adjustments directly to the database. This will lead to faster and more accurate updates for student and completely eliminate the risk of an entire collection of our database being deleted.

  

• Now when booking Pro Spots, students will see a count of how many Pro Drills they have remaining before fees kick in.

• Before this change, there was an often incorrect popup that said there would be a fee whenever a Pro booked more than 1 Pro Drill a day. This lead to lots of confusion and frustration with new Pros.

Book a Spanish Drill now and try it out! Let us know what you think.

Book Drill

Not a Pro yet? Upgrade now!

Boost your Spanish confidence with daily practice and accountability from compassionate human partners. Become a Pro today and see the difference!

Become a Pro

• April 5, 2023: Speak App v6.3.4 and Teach v6.2.2

  • Students can now be promoted to Speaker in Drill, regardless of their VIP status and/or how they signed up for the Drill

  • Instructors can see a new button next to the names of students who aren't Speakers that can be used to promote them

  • Instructors can see the student's VIP status and when they made their account while in Drill

• March 14, 2023: Speak App v6.3.1

  • Small patch for database recording of campaign usage for student bookings

• March 14, 2023: Speak App v6.3.0

  • We're introducing the idea of campaigns, which will mostly be used internally to track the rewards that we give to students for marketing emails

    • This is work to support our marketing team’s March campaign, where we'll be offering 3 free days of VIP membership to students. They'll be able to redeem their membership with just a link!

  • To support the work above, students who aren't logged in will now have the information about where they were going to login carried over. Ex: If a student tries to access the book page but they're not logged in, they'll be redirected to the book page after they do log in

• March 7, 2023: Speak App v6.2.5

  • Styling bug fix

• March 7, 2023: Speak App v6.2.4

  • Cancel link is now visible, in addition to the Book page, on the home page under "Upcoming Booked Drills" and on the lesson summary page

  • Spanish translation of the hearts modal has been added

  • General small scale style updates to the Speak App

Over a year ago, we launched an exciting new feature within the student-facing Speak App: Drills, with no third party video conferencing software needed.

This week, we’ve launching a new and improved version of the Drill experience. We knew what our students love about Drills, like the uniquely fast-paced learning environment and sense of community they create. But we also knew there was room for improvement.

The New Interface

Before:

After:

Our new UI for Drills features a simplified menu bar that users have the choice to toggle on and off. It puts students in charge of their own learning experience. They also have less work to do: all possible action items (like muting/unmuting, changing your microphone, or going full screen) are on their right-hand side, meaning they won’t get distracted looking for buttons while they want to be focusing on learning.

What’s New?

Learn the Way You Like To

The toggle allows students to simplify their view even further, and fully focus on the class material, without distraction. See it below:

Our students provide us with excellent feedback on the interface, Drill Instructors, and overall class experience, and we don’t take that for granted. One of the most frequent points of concern with the interface was that the text was too small on our slides. Now, when students collapse the menu sidebar, they can use their whole screen to view the slides at a larger, and more legible size.

For students who like to keep their focus on their own experience, they can also choose to hide the extra information of Drills, but keep the controls that are essential to them.

We ❤️ You

Beepboop runs on a Freemium model - students don’t have to pay to join, but their learning will be greatly enhanced if they do. Our paying students get access to their performance statistics, higher prioritization in topic selection for Drills, and more calls within Drill.

But we knew that the labels we were using within Drill weren’t helping communicate this in a friendly, approachable way. Students new to the platform would drop into lessons without knowing why their treatment in class was different compared to other students. That’s why we’ve introduced the concept of ❤️s in Drill. They still correspond to student types within Drill, just with a more familiar visual language.

Each heart represents your relative speaking opportunities compared to other students. Here’s what the hearts mean:

1. ❤️❤️❤️❤️ - Student is a Speaker, and will get 4x as many speaking opportunities as other students (only VIPs can register for Drills as Speakers)

2. ❤️ - Student is an Audience Member, whose speaking turns are divided amongst other Audience Members in Drill with them

3. No Hearts - Student is an Observer, who doesn’t get any speaking turns in Drill

A Satisfying Conclusion

We know your experience with Beepboop isn’t just within Drills—it’s before and after them too. That’s why we invested time into redesigning the screen you see after Drills are over. The new look is cleaner, simpler, and will be a solid foundation to build off of as we launch new ways for our students to look at their post-Drill performance.

We also removed direct access to Talkkaround, our live post-Drill game where students could work on their learning outside of the classroom. While it’s goodbye for now, we may reintroduce it in the future.

If you loved Drill before, don’t worry. All the functionality is still there, just with a more streamlined look.

What’s Next

This is by no means a final version of our interface. We’ll be iterating on it to make it easier, less distracting, and more motivating for our students as feedback rolls in and we learn the best ways to support learning. In the next few months, we plan on releasing experimental features to make Drills both as engaging and as joyful as possible!

We’re also monitoring feedback as it rolls in. Every piece of feedback is valuable to us, and listening to what our students have to say is a vital step in our ideation process. We have a custom feedback form that students can access after taking a Drill, and we’ll be closely reading comments about our new interface: both about what students like, and what areas we have to improve.

Thank You!

We know that change is hard; we kept the same Drill interface for over a year! Thank you so much to all of our students who are able to adapt, learn, and grow with us.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you love our new interface (and if you don’t, tell us in the comments—we’ll listen)!

• December 16, 2022: Speak App v6.1.4

  • Added support for data tracking when booking Drills (for marketing purposes)

• December 14, 2022: Speak App v6.1.3

  • Booking a Medical Simulation Drill now requires an organizational privilege, so all non-medical students, regardless of VIP status, can only book Medical Simulation Drills as observers

  • Added filtering for Medical Simulation Drills on the Book page

  • General component styling updates

  • Updates to Spanish translation of the page

  • On sign up, when students select they want to learn the same language they're reading the page in, they get a warning asking them to confirm that's what their target language is

• November 10, 2022: Speak App v6.1.1

  • UI improvements to the New Student welcome page to improve user onboarding experience

• August 26, 2022: Speak App v5.2.0

  • The app will load faster for all users, thanks to major under-the-hood improvements to routing and implementation of code-splitting

  • Update styling for the class feedback form, as well as the ability to access the form with one click from after-class emails

  • Update booking page filters to reflect current class types

  • Add translations to payment confirmation page

  • Security updates

• August 9, 2022: Speak App v5.1.10

  • Funnel Analysis: Add anonymized event logging of when a user registers for and attends their first and second classes. This helps us easily compare week-over-week data to see how we’re improving motivating students to learn.

• August 4, 2022: Speak App v5.1.9

  • Stability update. No user-facing changes

• August 1, 2022: Speak App v5.1.8

  • Stability update. No user-facing changes

• July 19, 2022: Speak App v5.1.6

  • Update age limits for user registration

  • Patch bug in which podcast audio sometimes auto-played on Book page

  • Referral program content update

• July 15, 2022: Speak App v5.1.5

  • Remove redundant fetching of student info to improve app load speed

  • Fix some translation errors for English learners

  • Enable query strings (deep-linking) for English learners

  • Fix inaccurate login page title for DI referral links

  • Add language-specific FAQ links

  • Fix error when attempting to load wordBundle for module that has none

  • Package updates to fix minor security vulnerabilities

• July 11, 2022: Speak App v5.1.4

  • Add support for redirecting paths from habla.beepboop.us to speak.beepboop.us

  • Add Profile page for English learners

  • Support new student creation directly from VIP purchase for English learners

  • Fix minor display bug that affected logged-out users attempting to load a page for which login is required

• July 1, 2022: Speak App v5.1.3

  • Minor corrections to Spanish-language translations

• June 30, 2022: Speak App v5.1.2

  • Add Topic Tree and Study functions for English learners

  • Adjust logic for matching newly-registered students with ongoing classes

  • Fix bug when users load tabs with expired login sessions

• June 24, 2022: Speak App v5.1.0 and 5.1.1

  • Under-the-hood work to support multiple languages on the app

  • Allow Spanish-speaking students to register for English classes

  • … More to come on this soon!

• June 10, 2022: Talkkaround Game App v0.0.11:

  • Warn users when connection is unstable

  • Disable game buttons after click (until turn ends or action can be taken again)

  • Ensure that only one user attempts to join an offer to play

  • Security updates

• June 10, 2022: Speak App v5.0.15

  • Minor styling fixes on the vocabulary review page

  • Improved error handling and logging so we can more quickly investigate and solve bugs

  • Security updates

• June 6, 2022: Talkkaround Game App v0.0.10:

  • Show a message in the lobby and on the post-game screen when someone is waiting to play

  • Show how many users are playing right now in the lobby

  • Prevent the play screen for a complete/expired game from loading

  • Fix a bug that could sometimes cause duplicate games to be created

• June 2, 2022: Speak App v5.0.13

  • Students can now set the topic for classes ahead of time

    • cost: $2

    • from the confirmation page after they book a class

      • only displays the “Set Topic” button if

        • class doesn’t already have a module set

        • class is a Drill

        • class starts more than 101 minutes from now

      • student has 10 minutes to finish their purchase before the attempt is cancelled

      • topics dropdown for them to choose from

        • initially populated from Wish List

        • if <10 topics on Wish List, the dropdown is filled up with 10 random topics

    • upon successful completion of Stripe payment flow

      • student is redirected to “payment is processing” screen

      • as soon as we receive a message from Stripe that the payment succeeded

        • the student sees “payment successful”

        • the topic is successfully set for that lesson

        • nobody else can set the topic for that lesson

• June 1, 2022: Talkkaround Game App v0.0.9:

  • Fix bug when handling malformed query strings

  • Remove dependency on user’s device time being correct

  • Close race conditions in game start that could result in a player being “stranded” and unable to start the game

Also, view some of our classic tech release videos below. We do them in one take with just a bulleted list to guide us. We’re moving fast.