Interview with Technical Director Thomas Holl

Speech recognition is the exciting new feature at  Babbel. It’s not only fun – it’s also amazingly efficient for learning a new language. But how does it work? I got the low down from our Technical Director Thomas.

Crisi: What does the new speech recognition tool do?

Thomas: Basically, we use pronunciation samples recorded by our native speaking course editors and compare your pronunciation to theirs. As always with Babbel, you get instant feedback. The closer your pronunciation is to this example, the more points you get on a scale from 0 to 100. If you get more than 50 points, you’re good enough to be generally understood.

Crisi: But if you just compare two sounds, is that really speech recognition?

Thomas: Sure, we recognize what you say. We’re now sitting in front of the screen and we are talking but you see that the score is 0 all the time. Now, try saying arrivederci.

Crisi: Arrivederci

Thomas: Nice, 78 points.  Better than Aldo Raine in “Inglorious Basterds” (see details here). Remember the hilarious scene where Brad Pitt is trying to speak Italian? We ran his pronunciation through our analysis and as you might expect he scored pretty low. But I’m digressing, sorry. Back to our little test. Your pronunciation is about 78% exact compared to our reference sample. That’s pretty good.

Crisi: Still, it’s only about comparing sounds, not about understanding what I say.

Thomas: Well, there are different sub-types of speech recognition. One is speech-to-text or voice control. That’s what you’d use to enter text or commands if you can’t use a keyboard. Recognizing words and evaluating their pronunciation is another sub-type, and that’s the technology that makes sense for language learning. We can use it for pronunciation training and for building new interactive exercises.

Crisi: So, what’s the technical challenge in this sub-type of speech recognition?

Thomas: Well, it’s not as easy as it sounds – no pun intended. It’s actually not enough to just compare two sounds. It’s a little like telling how similar two people look in two different photos. The audio samples are usually pretty different: a woman has a higher voice than a man and the tempo of speech also differs a lot. And then you have a number of artifacts…

Crisi: Artifacts?

Thomas: Noises and characteristics that are caused by the environment or the technical setup: rumbling, hissing, other sounds mixing into the voice. Most people don’t have a high-end microphone connected to their computer and in our case we just use the built-in mic on my laptop. The audio quality of what the system is hearing is pretty poor.

Crisi: So to make the speech recognition work properly, our users need to have a good mic and be in a quiet room?

Thomas: No, that’s the point: we can also work with cheap microphones and filter out noise in the immediate environment. That’s part of the challenge.

Crisi: Sounds like a lot of filtering and levelling…

Thomas: Yes, that also, but there’s more: We have to distil the “core” of the voice sample and then match that to the original. To do that, the system needs to figure out when you start and stop speaking. You don’t have to press any key to start and stop recording; we do the matching in real-time.

Crisi: So everything we say into the system here is somehow analyzed?

Thomas: Right. Just look at the level: every sound input is analyzed and matched to the sound we’re looking for. In this case, arrivederci.

Crisi: 55 points

Thomas: Ok, yours is better than mine. But you see that the word was recognized among all the other things we said.

Crisi: Is this unique technology? Are there other software product that do this?

Thomas: There are a number of software products that do have speech recognition. Some of them also are of decent quality.

Crisi: So what’s so special about the Babbel speech recognition?

Thomas: Well, it’s online and works in your browser.

Crisi: Does this mean that everything we say here is sent to the Babbel servers and analyzed there?

Thomas: No, the whole audio processing is done instantly, directly in the browser. We don’t have to send the audio to the server and that’s why we can give instant feedback.

Crisi: Do I have to install a plugin or something?

Thomas: You don’t. It’s all done in Flash. 97% of all browsers have the Flash plugin pre-installed. As we use the latest version, you might have to do an update, but that’s very quick. Other than that, you just need a microphone like the one that’s built into my laptop.

Crisi: Babbel has been online since January 2008. Why did it take so long to add this feature?

Thomas: We needed the new Flash Player 10.1 because before that it wasn’t possible to do audio processing locally. It would have been necessary to either send all the audio to the server for analyses or to use a custom browser plugin.

Crisi: What’s wrong with a custom browser plugin?

Thomas: First of all, you have to install new software on your computer. And then you have compatibility issues. There are some rare solutions that offer real-time speech recognition in a browser plugin, but most of them won’t work on your Mac and none of them are compatible with all browsers. Flash is already there, the plugin works fine and it’s available for all platforms.

Crisi: How about the iPhone? You can’t use Flash technology on that platform, can you?

Thomas: No, but the Babbel iPhone apps work natively on the iPhone anyway.

Crisi: Natively?

Thomas: The Babbel apps are built specifically for the iPhone and don’t need a browser or plugin to work. That’s called a “native” application. We can build our algorithm directly into the app.

Crisi: That’s not related to Native Instruments, the software company you used to work for?

Thomas: (laughs): No, not directly. But for being an audio software company, Native Instruments definitely is a great name because the software works natively on the computer.

Crisi: I guess we don’t have to understand that completely. But speaking of audio software: has your audio expertise (along with that of the other Babbel founders) been crucial for this new feature or is it something entirely different than building DJ tools?

Thomas: Both. Of course working on beat detection and time stretching for music and building a speech recognition tool are two different things. On the other hand, we couldn’t have done this in-house without our background.

Crisi: So who actually implemented the new feature?

Thomas: Most of it was done by Toine Diepstraten, one of the Babbel founders. He and I started working together on audio software in our first company, d-lusion, more than 10 years ago. Toine is one of the best developers and audio specialists I’ve ever met. It’s fantastic to have him on board for this project. He did have to do quite some research but without his expertise, this would never have been possible. But this way we have state-of-the art technology that can compare with any other implementation.

Crisi: You sound very convinced

Thomas: From a technical point of view, this is a great piece of software. We actually got some recognition from Adobe, the makers of the Flash Player. They were pretty impressed by our solution.

Crisi: Will this be a focus for Babbel from now on, or do you plan to work on other types of features?

Thomas: It is a very important feature because now we can do everything online that traditional e-learning software can do locally. And we don’t need installation or updates and we have a very lively online community that goes together with the self-directed learning…

Crisi: But?

Thomas: It’s important but it’s not the end. We’ll keep working and adding new features.

Crisi: Can you say what’s next for Babbel?

Thomas: Sorry, but for that we’ll have to turn off the mic.

Crisi: No problem.
–

After we released the new speech recognition feature yesterday and had all the good feeedback, we got into what you might call a funny mood. We ended up testing some celebrities with our new feature.

It was loads of fun running Brad Pitt’s pronunciation through the tool to see what score he would have gotten for his Americanized Italian in Tarantino’s movie “Inglorious Basterds”. His buongiorno and arrivederci are understandable, but you have to admit the pronunciation is far from perfect!  According to our new tool that evaluates pronunciation quality, Lt. Aldo Raine scores a 53 for his buongiorno and a 57 for the famous arrivederci. A little practice could have probably helped…

You can try your own results in any of seven languages on Babbel.com. To practice Italian greetings, just select the beginner’s course. First step is free after a simple registration.

Beginners in Spanish can finally say gracias. There is now a full, Online Course on Babbel.com that will teach you all the basics you need to get by anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world,  from Barcelona to Santiago to downtown Los Angeles. Developed from proven print materials and adapted for the internet with Babbel.com’s consistent focus on fun and accessibility, “Spanish – Get Started” makes for one of the more effective ways to learn Spanish around — online or off.

The course is a one-time price of 19 Euros / 24 US Dollars, but try out an entire introductory Tutorial for free to get a taste here.

“Spanish – Get Started” is the first full Online Course available on Babbel for speakers of English. There is also a full Spanish course available for German speakers.

Matthew Kam, an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, speaks about his recent doctoral dissertation research in Indian communities and designing E-Learning games for children from other cultural backgrounds. His MILLEE (Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies) project was funded by the National Science Foundation and has won several awards, including one from the MacArthur Foundation.

Babbel Blog: Why do you think E-Learning games on cell phones can provide a learning benefit?

MK: The case for games for education has been made from two very different angles. One would be the theoretical angle, the other the empirical angle. From the theoretical point of view, educational researchers like James Paul Gee argued that games could incorporate very good educational principles. There have been studies on the empirical level which support this claim. The most useful study that we found was done by a team of MIT economists who studied a group of children from the urban slums in India – more than 10,000 slum children were involved in that experiment carried out over more than two years. They found that kids playing mathematical E-Learning games two times per week improved their scores on math tests. That was by far the strongest evidence so far that games have an impact for education. We thought, when mathematical games can make a difference, you should be able to achieve the same kind of benefits with language-learning games too. That is the whole motivation behind our game-based approach.

B: You started nearly five years ago with your visits to India. How did you get there?

In 2004 I got to know the work of a visiting professor at Berkeley, Dr. Urvashi Sahni, who has spent years working on initiatives to empower disadvantaged learners in India, in both villages and slums. I was pretty impressed by her work and wanted to examine how to introduce more sophisticated technologies into the equation.

Matthew Kam

B: You wrote in your dissertation, that the children in the villages have a lower level of familiarity with technology than the kids in the slums. Can you describe this difference?

In the rural areas there might be some exposure to technologies like refrigerators, light and even cell phones. Village kids don’t often use the phones of their parents; and when they do, it is usually the boys who get to use the phones, and parents are reluctant to let their daughters use them. In urban slums the level of technology is higher and the level of usage of cell phones, like SMS, is also more prevalent. The exposure to higher forms of technology like computers gives the children there a stronger foundation to use the cell phone applications we had developed for them.

B: Learning English in India is very important  to have access to better jobs, white collar jobs. How many people speak English in India?

The numbers vary a lot; one source I quoted in my dissertation speaks of five percent of the country knowing English well enough to be part of that elite.

B: You wrote about how the games of the Indian village kids differ from games Western children play. Please explain this.

We were halfway into the project when we realized that the earlier games we developed were not really making sense to the Indian children. That was when we decided to take a step back and try to understand what  the unique characteristics of their village games were and how they differ from contemporary western games. In arcade-type games, for example, the way to increase the difficulty level is to introduce more enemy characters at a higher level or have the enemies move faster at a higher level of difficulty. The challenges of those approaches are not applicable to the traditional games Indian village children play. That is because when they play a game among themselves on the playground, the numbers of human players are fixed. So there is no way to introduce more opponents. Similarly,, there is a human limit to how fast a human can run. We finally realized that one of the most common approach these traditional games use to increase difficulty is to introduce sub-goals, like having players move to certain locations on the playground and touch them.

B: How does your software work?

In our case, the cell phone application we developed for English learning comprises of several screens. First, to introduce the language to the kids: Things like English words, new sentence structures, as well as learning to put words together and construct sentences. And we have some screens, which test the children on their knowledge of English; for example they have to match the word with the right picture or spell various words. In most cases we try to make use of fun games. We might have a game that tries to teach the various ways for fruits. So we have each tree that represents a type of fruit and the player has to get to a certain tree to gather the correct fruit. We introduce challenges and other gameplay elements, which are standard design principles for making video games interesting to play.

B: Could this games work as a standalone approach or have teachers to be involved?

E-Learning needs to be complemented by other sources of learning. But in some of these developing regions it is difficult to get kids to school on a regular basis, because they are engaged in farming, housework or they generate income for the household – what you call child labor. If you use mobile devices like cell phones, you make some of the learning resources accessible outside the school settings. What we’re trying to do is to provide some of the foundations of English, like basic vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. When the children have that foundation, they will be better equipped to engage in a conversation with humans. That is where the real language learning, at least in a more advanced form, happens.

B: Are your games only text-based or are you using audio, too?

We use a combination of both modality; our focus is on written English as well as conversational. When we cover the latter, we expose the learner to the spoken form of the language through audio.

B: How is the technological infrastructure in India? And who can pay for a cell phone?

Even though connectivity is a problem in some rural areas in India, the bigger problem is the cost of air time, which it is very expensive for the rural families. That is why our games don’t require airtime. Electricity is not a serious problem either, at least not in the areas we conduct our studies. The real problem is, electricity comes at very irregular hours. Coming to the cost issue of the cell phones, I think that is the biggest challenge. There are two ways to address it: One way is to think about what is the lowest common denominator for a cell phone platform in order to make it possible to run language learning games. I think we can make a convincing case to cell phone manufacturers, that if they want to be part of rural education, these would be the features they have to support. I am pretty sure they could get the price point down to a certain level. What is more complicated: Get the manufactures, wireless carriers and governments to come on board to look into joint financing schemes. That is why a huge emphasis of the MILLEE project is to come up with credible learning results, that we can take to show policy makers that cell phone learning can make a difference.

B: What is next for your project?

We need to hand over the technology to the local communities to run them for themselves. And we have to encourage the kids to play the games to learn English when there are no pilot personnel around to supervise them. We have commenced such a study in the beginning of 2009, which is still ongoing at the time of writing.

One film the Babbel Bloggers caught during the Berlinale (February 5-15) was “Beeswax”. This is American auteur Andrew Bujalski’s third feature, which premiered on Monday, Feb. 9th. His genre, if it can even be classified as such, has been coined as “mumblecore”. But as a talk with him made clear, in his work and in the film world in general, often the last thing words do is clarify. You can still catch a screening of Beeswax in Berlin tonight or on Friday.

Babbel Blog: When I saw “Beeswax”, I was thinking about how I could connect it with issues of language. One thing that stood out to me in the movie was how you have this divide – or conflict – between personal and business language. “Are we business partners or friends?” “Am I your boyfriend or your lawyer?” That sort of thing.

Andrew Bujalski: Whenever I have to sign contracts it always produces a great anxiety in me, because I read the language of the document and it’s never language that I’ve written, or language I would necessarily subscribe to, though you’re not given the option to line-edit every contract you sign. But what’s frightening about them is that they are written in a language which doesn’t resemble the personal language you would use to suss out if you and someone you’re working with are working toward the same goal.

Andrew Bujalski

And it’s always interesting to me that even though it might technically be English, it never feels like English in the way that I use it or a way I would use it in my daily life. It’s language not meant to clarify as much as to codify or often obfuscate. So I was interested in the differences between …. people will use legal language toward a certain goal, and of course if they’re working together they have to use human language to work toward that same goal, but things are at cross purposes and they butt up against each other as I think they do in the film.

BB: Do you have personal experience with this sort of conflict between these two types of languages?

AB: To some extent, because I’ve always worked with friends, and there’s always inherent challenges in working with friends… I mean, the benefits far outweigh the difficulties. But there’s always an element of both…. when you try to clarify and codify that, for me it’s always uncomfortable to draw up any sort of document with someone you have a personal relationship with. Something always feels painful to me about that. And I think the film certainly gets at that.

BB: Your fims have been classified as “mumblecore” which I’m sure has become a buzzword you’re tired of being asked about…..

AB: It doesn’t really mean anything.

BB: I was thinking about the language of the film though, maybe it comes from this specific place, that is, as the characters are somehow similar to me – American, with a certain class background -, I can sort of relate to them directly, I know where they’re coming from. But I was wondering – if you have an international audience watching it, if there can still be some sort of claim to universality?

AB: I don’t know. I certainly hope so. I certainly would want universality for the film. On the one hand I think my films are in a strange place, because people have said – well, many Americans have said to me — “this would do great in Europe”, and I think what that means is that it’s quiet, it’s artistic, so maybe some of the aesthetic values are more in line with a European film tradition than an American film tradition. But on the other hand, I think the fims are extremely American, the cultural specifics of them, and it’s down to the cadences and the slang. Even the pauses and the hesitation in the speech feel specifically American. Are they going to translate very widely? Probably not. But I think that any film … cinema is a magical thing. And as much as it allows you to go all over the world… I don’t expect us to be a smash hit on any country on earth, but I do think the film can be understood anywhere.

BB: You were talking about the film being interpreted as “European”, but also how the content is quite American. Something I also noticed about the film is that there aren’t any clean resolutions, and cinematic clichés are constantly being evaded. For example the character Jeannie is in a wheelchair, but it’s never an issue; or when her employee is crying we never find out why. It never goes where as seasoned moviewatchers we think it should go. Maybe this is a stretch, but could this kind of cinematic language be interpreted as European (even if it’s said as an epithet?)

AB: In America there’s a notion that Europeans have more patience. May or may not be true. I guess it’s probably true.

Also America is the home of demographic research. So programming a film according to what test audiences press buttons on. And there’s a lot of things in this film that a test audience would not approve of.

BB: Why wouldn’t they?

AB: Oh I don’t know, you’d have to ask them. If I were in the test audience I’d give it a ten out of ten every time.

BB: Who are your actors?

AB: They’re all nonprofessionals. Well…. even that gets a little shady, defining who’s professional and who’s not. But for the most part they don’t live in New York or LA or pursue acting fulltime.

The twins, Tilly (pictured above) and Maggie Hatcher – Maggie I went to college with, met her ten years ago and met Tilly soon after that — and they’re both such remarkably charismatic people. And then you put them together and there is this just this sort of instant fascination — I have a half-brother and siblings, but I didn’t grow up with a brother in the house. I think like a lot of people I am fascinated by twins. So it was just in the back of my head for a long time, if I could try and capture, or ride some of the fumes of the magic of that relationship, that would be a great thing to bottle up and get on screen.

It’s sort of a…. whenever you’re trying to take something magical from reality and get it on screen, you’re asking for a… well, there’s something a little hubristic about it, but I think that’s what filmmakers do.

BB: Yes, they’re clearly sisters in real life, and the way they communicate with each other is also this very natural way of speaking. Though you wrote the script, how much of it was improvised?

AB: It all hews pretty closely to the structure of the screenplay, and that was true in my earlier films and even more true in this one, because this film has shorter scenes and there’s more exposition squeezed into every scene. So there’re a lot more specific points that need to be hit to keep the story on track. So again… I’ve never been able to… People have always asked me, what percentage of this is improvised? And I don’t know what the number is, I don’t even know … I have trouble with the question because I feel to some extent that ALL acting is some sort of improvisation.

But there are moments in there. A funny language example – and a funny twins example – there’s a bit where Tilly’s character Jeannie uses the word “scorching” to refer to this evening she spent with an ex-boyfriend. That word wasn’t in the script. But then “scorching” comes up again later when Maggie’s character, Lauren, is talking about the salsa they are eating at a Mexican restaurant. And she says it and she sort of raises her eyebrows and it almost… I mean, I think in the film it seems like a direct reference or a reflection on the other scene. But that was something I didn’t write – I didn’t write the word “scorching”in either scene, but both of them put that in independently without knowing the other had come up with it! That’s another great twin confluence. In the editing, I thought, “that’s sort of amazing”, that was a gift they gave me without knowing that they gave it to me.

BB: Lastly, the movie kind of made me think of “Slacker”. Not that the movies are all that similar, but that that movie was like the generation before, and “Beeswax” clearly has something that speaks to people in their 20s and 30s now. Is there a special way of talking for this generation that is portrayed in the film?

AB:I don’t know… that’s another question I have trouble with. You know, the word generation comes up and I tense up. I wonder if that will be on peoples mind with this film. My previous two films were about people in their twenties, and for some reason, when you’re talking about people in their twenties there’s a tendency for people to want to say, “are you defining a generation”. I think once people start to get older, in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s… nobody cares about that generation anymore, you know, it’s like the generation has been defined. So as I’ve gotten older certainly, and the characters have gotten older, I…. I don’t know if it will be asked to define a generation anymore. We’ll see.

]]> http://blog.babbel.com/magic-mumblecore-and-not-exactly-talkin-bout-my-generation-interview-at-the-berlinale-with-andrew-bujalski/feed/ 2 http://blog.babbel.com/inside-babbelcom-curiosity-is-key/ http://blog.babbel.com/inside-babbelcom-curiosity-is-key/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:29:14 +0000 Mara http://blog.babbel.com/?p=556

The Babbel Blog team took a short trip on the UBahn over to the Berlin office of Babbel.com, the interactive language-learning platform, to speak with Ulrike Kerbstadt (right) and Sylvie Roche (left). They are Just two of the folks responsible for the learning content at the website. Click here to listen to the interview that is part one in a series taking a gander “Inside Babbel”.

Babbel Blog: What do you do at Babbel?

Ulrike Kerbstadt: I’m responsible for language learning content. I develop the material with a team of native speakers and have the didactic background.

Sylvie Roche: I’m content editor and work with the same team developing other kinds of content.

BB: What is Babbel, what does Babbel do?

UK: On the one hand, you vocabulary packages, you can learn a set of words for a special topic, we also have writing tasks where you can interact with other people, communicate with the community in real-life situations and we have what we call interactive tutorials.

SR: On the other hand we have the community platform where you can learn for yourself but of course with other people. Other people are going to correct you. You can ask any question about translation or what you will find in a country when you go on vacation…

UK: Yeah, that’s the other specialty we have… we have this huge community of native speakers where you always get real feedback, you have real-life situations and that’s really motivating for our users.

SR: For example we have the writing exercises, and concretely, we ask you a question, you have a small video or some pictures, and you can write something about it. You send it to someone you don’t know, to the community, then the community or special people you have chosen answer to you. Sometimes it develops some internet friendships, and people are going to write more to each other. And we see that that really happens.

UK: We also have other features like the chat or direct messaging, or the board, where you get a lot of user feedback, comments and so on. Many opportunities to communicate.

BB: Where did the idea for these features come from, what’s the philosophy behind them?

UK: We think that curiosity is the key to language learning, and with an internet platform like this we can really keep that curiosity alive, put people into real situations where it’s necessary to communicate. So they’re motivated, there aren’t inhibitions to use the language, even at an early stage, at a low level. Because every user is a language learner, everyone who teaches you something or corrects you also learns a language, and that really makes it easier for you.

SR: An important thing is, we’re teaching European languages, but many of our users don’t come from Europe — but they are still native speakers. For example, we have Spanish speakers who come from Mexico, so if you write something in Spanish because you’re learning Spanish, you will send it to a Spanish speaker, but you might send it to a Venezuelan or a Mexican, and people will tell you, well, in my country, people might rather say this or that.

UK: You get to know people from Algeria, Morocco, you learn so much about different cultures… there are so many topics to talk about.

BB: Could you give us a favorite example of a writing exercise?

UK: I quite like the exercise about “A Holiday in the Desert” — You have to make up something, describe an extreme holiday. And you have pictures that go with it… most of the time these pictures really stir up emotions or are really funny, that’s really motivating to write something.

SR: Actually I really like the one – though most of the users didn’t do it – where Jenny was worried about her rabbit, and John had cooked rabbit for dinner, and what happened to the rabbit? She went away… was she right or wrong to do that, and why? And lots of people didn’t do that … There was one that was quite popular, What do you do in your free time? Most of the people wrote very simple phrases, but we had a lot of answers. For example, on the weekend I like to play basketball and have a walk with my dog. And then other people say, that’s funny, I have a dog too, what’s your dog? So it’s not only about the language. Of course, people correct each other, but it’s about communication, interaction.

BB: So imagine you’re creating a new tutorial from scratch. How do you start it?

UK: At the beginning we sketch everything out, we have a little draft of the content, then our technicians here have made a very nice tool, the Tutorial Builder, and it works a bit like power point. You have all these different components, and can put together pictures with dialogue etc., or make a multiple choice task, and you decide if you want speakers with the text or do you want the text to be in the mother tongue or in the foreign language, also design things…

BB: The way you lay out material, does that come from books?

UK: Well, there’s the European Reference Frame, which gives advice as to what kind of learner needs what kind of knowledge at whatever stage, and we follow that.

BB: What is that exactly, the European Reference Frame?

UK: It’s for all language learners in whatever language you might be studying, there are special communicative situations where you have to get around — for example as a beginner you don’t have to be able to write a letter but yes take a note. Of course we also have a look at material in books etc.

BB: Have either of you worked as teachers before?

UK: I taught German as a foreign language here in Berlin, and of course there it’s a completely different situation in front of a class. Here what we develop is self-learning material. It’s important to keep people motivated – have a learning effect behind the fun. But here it’s much more the fun factor. That’s out priority.

SR: I was in international schools my whole school time, learned French and German, but moreover film, media in the university. So I learned how to learn, and what’s the problems are in learning, what can stop your curiosity. So I think I make a good team with Ulrike, because she knows how to teach things, and I’m more knowledgeable about breaks that can occur in learning. So together maybe I’m more the “fun” part. And she’s maybe more serious – well, she has the more serious background. Together we work well.

BB: How many languages do you speak?

SR: Well, French is my mother tongue but I speak five other languages…

UK: I learned translation from English and French (to German), but also a bit of Spanish and Portuguese.

SR: I think what’s also important to us is – as you said – to learn only things you can apply in every day life. What’s important is what you learn and not something that’s in a book that’s very correct but that you’ll never use because no one ever says it.

UK: Yeah we take care that the material is funny, the pictures are funny — I think we have a lot of fun developing the material, we have a good laugh together!

BB: Where do you think Babbel is going? Where do you see it in 2010?

SR: This year we tested a lot, Babbel grew. Before we were only five, and now we’re twelve with a lot of freelancers. I think what we tested is that the community is very important and still very important. .. this fun factor is very important and we will keep on doing that. With users uploading their own pictures so they’re involved, but also – content that is really serious and … “Babbel approved”. You can really go away, shut your computer down and say, I learned something and in a week I’ll remember it. It’s really a serious matter too.

UK: And maybe we’re going to have more user-generated content someday. That people build their own exercises and put them online, then you have a picture from the person and other users can vote if it’s a good tutorial or a bad one. Everyone can build material like us. Everyone can play teacher.

SR: As I said before, we have people from the community who come from all over the world, and the fact that you go to another country and learn how you speak there in that country… if it’s user-generated content then they will say, well if you come to my country and order something in a restaurant, you have to say these kinds of words

UK: You could learn for example Scottish English… Australian, etc…

BB: Are there other languages coming?

UK: Yes, we were thinking about Turkish, Portuguese, and Chinese and Arabic we would love too, but that might be complicated with another alphabet…

]]> http://blog.babbel.com/inside-babbelcom-curiosity-is-key/feed/ 2 http://blog.babbel.com/babbel-investor-kizoo-in-business-at-the-end-of-the-day-you-have-to-trust-each-other/ http://blog.babbel.com/babbel-investor-kizoo-in-business-at-the-end-of-the-day-you-have-to-trust-each-other/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:18:13 +0000 Lorenz http://blog.babbel.com/?p=603

Babbel Blog’s Interview with Frank Schüler und Matthias Hornberger of Kizoo, a Babbel investor. Schüler is Kizoo’s president and was managing director of subsidiaries of Web.de; Hornberger is Kizoo’s CFO and responsible for Finance, Controlling, Investor Relations & Corporate Affairs. (For the original German version click here)

When did you first hear about the “internet”?

Frank Schüler:

In business terms it was around 1995. We probably all figured out what roll the internet was going to play at the university. For me personally, in ‘91 and ‘92, it was a communication tool between universities. I myself was in New York then, and at the time the internet was already an important communication tool with people back home.

Matthias Hornberger:

For me it was in the second half of the 90s. It was already in the professional world as a communiation tool, though I only realized much later its range of possibilities in an information-based world and in applications. The Greve brothers, the founders of web.de, recognized this potential in the first half of the 90s, focusing their young business on this 100% and staking their first claims. Those were domains like web.de, flug.de, lastminute.de. In those years of entrepreneurial acitivity, sustainable business models were built on those. Web 1.0, as you would say today.

M. Hornberger

After selling web.de in 2005, you tried to establish ComBOTS as a kind of messenger web application – why didn’t it work out?

Hornberger:

It was a very aggressive attempt to newly define communication, to provide a completely new communication experience for the user. As was evident, the user – and in the end the customer is king – didn’t accept it in this way or didn’t depend on it so much. It’s hard to say if we just came up with it too early or if our approach was wrong in some aspects. In any case one has to admit the product didn’t pick up as much momentum as we had hoped.

Schüler:

F. Schüler

We stressed privacy a lot. You could safely exchange data – communication data but also multi-media data – on a one-to-one basis. In reality, without even thinking about privacy, users uploaded very compromising pictures to their social networks. They didn’t consider privacy important at all.

After ComBOTS ended in 2007, Kizoo – Technology Ventures – was founded in May 2008. How did you find Babbel?

Hornberger:

Amazingly Babbel was a cold call – in May 2008 Mr. Heine came right in to our Investor Relations Department: “You do investments – we have a good story”. We did all the talking really quickly and made the thing happen together with the IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft Berlin as a co-investor. Contact to transaction occurred in less than two months. That is an extremely short amount of time for a venture capital project like this.

What convinced you?

Hornberger:

First at all, the team. We believe that that’s what matters most: Better a brilliant team with a maybe not so seasoned project than the other way around. Second: The business model, especially the market segment that Babbel chose, because it”s flexible, internationalization is possible and it is very oriented toward the future. Learning languages is a universal subject and steadily gaining importance. It is a human necessity. In internet jargon it’s „sticky” – long lasting.

The core team at Babbel came from the Berlin-based music software producer Native Instruments – did that influence your decision?

Schüler:

Native Instruments wasn’t really important to us per se, rather the team’s experience with it, since it gave them their first entrepreneurial responsibiliy. You could see it in how they presented themselves: Very authentic and very professional

Hornberger:

All questions were answered very precisely, they delivered every time. They had good “expectation management”: They never built up expectations that they couldn’t follow through on. At the end of the day, in business relations you have to trust each other, and this trust occurs in the first talks. From a professional perspective it fit, but we had good chemistry, too.

How many users do you expect to pay a „premium service” at Babbel?

Schüler:

Basically it doesn’t matter so much. More important is that the the core idea be commercialized. When you think of phrasebooks, language courses or language tours that people feel natural about paying for, it seems normal enough for us.

But are users willing to spend money for internet services?

Hornberger:

Unlinke e-mail-services or access to information, professional language learning has always been paid for. Since school it is normal to pay for it; you pay hundreds of Euros for a pack of CDs from Langenscheid (German dictionary) – we believe that this is what’s going to make it easier to implement paid services.

Schüler:

In the end we rely on our own experience. We generated growth with a free service, the freemail product Web.de. We later introduced a members’ product and everybody asked, why would anyone pay for this? In the end we found many people who were willing to and are still glad to pay for it. The crucial thing is for the basic concept to be able to grow on an international basis, to get to big numbers. Then a small percentage chosing premium service is enough. And that is what we expect of Babbel.

Does such a model only work in the educational sector?

Hornberger:

Babbel’s approach: oriented around entertainement, with a huge fun-factor, a lot of multimedia with pictures and audio – this approach works in other learning and education sectors. In this respect the model is flexible enough to expand to other content – Babbel’s technical know-how was a strong argument for our investment.

What kind of investment opportunities is Kizoo looking for?

Hornberger:

There are still interesting segments of the internet. Even with Google – search is still interesting, games are an exiting field, and learning, beyond languages, is even another subject. Communities are on the downward slope, the market is saturated and the ad-based business model can’t sustain itself. But we hope to see ideas that no one’s thought of yet, particularly in mobile applications. Even Google and Amazon were rejected by investors in their early stages. We don’t want to have a similar missed opportunity in ten years, that is why we have to look a lot and closely…

What is the impact of the economic crisis on internet investments?

Hornberger

For the start-up phase it doesn’t mean that much, because turnover and credit financing are at more or less zero. But it has an impact on the venture capital market. Money that was slated for certain things isn’t there. On a whole the psychology is quite defensive at the moment. But compared to the housing market or the auto industry, the internet investment sector as a risk is negligible: Web 2.0 doesn’t need a public safety net. There will be good deals in 2009. But exits will certainly be harder.

Last question: Are you learning any languages?

Schüler:

I am learning Spanish at Babbel.

Hornberger:

I am learning the language that is least learned at Babbel: Italian. I love the dramatic sound of the language, but I haven’t gotten far yet. But Babbel motivates me regularly via email.

(Translation: Mara)

Babbel.com, our humble sponsor, recently acquired and joined forces with the online social networking site Friendsabroad.com. We caught up with Friendsabroad founder Simon Murdoch to talk a bit about this phenomenon of online language learning and the internet biz in the wake of the crunch.

Babbel Blog: Please talk about Doyouspeak.com and Friendsabroad.com. What are they, how long have they been around and how did you come up with them?

Simon Murdoch: My personal background is in the internet business, and I’ve been a VC investor and and an angel investor in the internet businesses. Then around 2004 I decided I wanted to get involved in language and technology, so I actually set up Friendsabroad in 2004. The idea was for it to be a pure language exchange, and helping people to connect, to talk to each other with emails, and then text chats, and then we added a skype integration of sorts. Doyouspeak is a separate website that we launched in the beginning of this year, January 2008, which is more purely targeted at English, it’s an online English school. So a completely different model than the Friendsabroad system.
What was your particular interest in language learning?

Like other English and Americans I’ve always been aware that we don’t speak as many languages as others around Europe, so I wanted to do something to make it more motivational, really, using technology. Mostly those of us who learn languages do it in a very dry way, at school or from books or even from CD-ROMs or tapes, and it’s not as interactive and interesting as when you meet real people, so we set up Friendsabroad with the view that by meeting people and interacting with people it would make it much more motivational, and therefore more engaging. There are a lot of people on the site, and it does keep your interest going.

How many languages are on there? What are some of the more popular ones?

It’s like on Babbel – EFIGS – English, French, Italian, German, Spanish. But we do have over eighty languages on there and there are people doing unusual things. Unusual mixtures. Japanese people talking to Portuguese people for example.

Online language learning has lately become a bit of a phenomenon. But in general, what do you think could be better in that world?

The thing that makes online language learning interesting from different points of view is that it’s an enormous market, there’s a huge amount of people that want to improve their language skills, in many countries. It’s fun to connect with people across language barriers and borders. One of the things I’ve found a challenge is: How do you do something that people are willing to pay for? Because most of us when we learn languages we do it at school and we don’t pay for it. I saw a survey a little while ago, one of the questions was, what would make you learn a language, and a number of people said they would learn a language if it’s free.

What could be done to improve it? I think the challenge is – you can make the content very interesting. And you can make the process interesting by connecting people.

What other things does Friendsabroad have in store for the future?

Well we’ve just had this deal where we’re still operating the site but we’re encouraging people to move over to Babbel, so we’re not doing any further developments. We’re handing the baton over to Babbel.

What advantages – or disadvantages — do Babbel.com and Friendsabroad.com, have in comparison to their competitors?

I think – I know it’s supposed to be global, but — one of the advantages we have in Europe is more experience with people who speak other languages. People are so used to doing business across borders, Germany in particular is very impressive with this. So I think having a European focus helps with having the right attitude.

I think compared to competitors, one of the challenges in Europe is that the US has access to funding. One of Babbel’s main competitors in the States has raised six million dollars, and it’s a lot easier to raise venture capital and angel investment in America. I guess that means we need to be smarter over here and produce a better product to be successful.

Do you really think though the ability to raise more money is based on producing a better or worse product ? I mean, when you’re comparing Europe and the United States? Is there a different culture for the funding of online projects?

I mean it’s relatively easy, especially on the west coast of the states, to raise money for online projects. I think in any of these projects the thing is to delight your customer, and the good thing about Babbel is that the content is fresh and interesting, it’s really like that in any service, whether it’s offline or online, the important thing is to have the users think what you’re doing is great.

What advice would you have then for startups these days in Europe or America? Especially now with the economy fraught as it is?

I think the economy is challenging… and it means that we’re back to basics, you might say. The important thing is to find a service for which customers are willing to pay the right amount of money . Even in the States I think financing is harder to come by than it was before the crunch, and so any business that wants to survive and thrive has to do a great job for customers. My key piece of advice for any startup is that they concentrate on their business model.

So you worked with Bookpages.com before you sold it to Amazon.co.uk and then continued to work there. What was the difference between working at these two companies?

The key difference was – I was relatively young when I started Bookpages – they’re quite English, if you like, and it was interesting when they became part of Amazon. Amazon was an ambitious American company. I think they perfectly named the company. The name (Amazon) is a very generic name because the aim was to provide a site where you could go for anything. It didn’t have “book” in the name. It had connotations of greatness. And now they sell just about anything online to many countries in the world. And Bookpages only sold books in the UK. So that American ambition was very interesting!

Now if I were to compare Bookpages to Friendsabroad – an interesting comparison in terms of setting up a business – Bookpages was unusual in the sense that it had successful businesses to emulate, Amazon, etc. And even now the model of selling products online, commerce, where you’re selling physical products and delivering to people, is a very well established business model. There are many successful commerce categories in many different categories.

Now compare that with Friendsabroad, where there wasn’t a company to emulate and copy, if you like, and one of the things we have found challenging is finding out how to do something that would be a good business model for us, something that’s at a level where customers want to pay. So … I think that experience has been quite different.

What about Doyouspeak.com? How is that different from Friendsabroad?

It’s better but it still proves an interesting challenge, because people are still not used to the idea that you can have a physical teacher through the internet. But that model is still better than Friendsabroad.com where people are not so keen to pay for a social community. I mean, people are used to things like Facebook being completely free, paid for by advertising. We didn’t actually charge for that social community, and I don’t think we could have anyway.

Are people responding well to Doyouspeak.com?

Yeah, we have teachers in the UK and students mainly around Europe and a few in South America. The students like the service, it’s good having a “real English teacher”. The calls are easy to do, we have an online classroom, on the screen etc., so the whole service works really well.

Lastly, have you ever tried to learn a language online?

Yeah!

What are you studying right now?

I’m doing a bit of French here and there. I also have a face-to-face teacher here in England. And I use language exchange things like Friendsabroad.com to get in contact with people and get motivated. I have tried over the years to learn from books and CD-ROMs and I don’t seem to gain anything that way. It’s much better to have a teacher and exchange partners.

]]> http://blog.babbel.com/have-the-users-think-what-youre-doing-is-great-simon-murdoch-on-online-services-today/feed/ 3 http://blog.babbel.com/jason-lutes-making-the-leap-from-cold-history-to-something-that-feels-more-alive/ http://blog.babbel.com/jason-lutes-making-the-leap-from-cold-history-to-something-that-feels-more-alive/#comments Sun, 30 Nov 2008 12:41:19 +0000 Lorenz http://blog.babbel.com/?p=497 The recently published “Berlin – City of Smoke”, playing in 1929/30, is the second book in an eventual graphic-novel triology. Its creator, Jason Lutes, talks about diving into German history without speaking German.

You hadn’t been to Berlin before you started the comic – How did you make a picture for yourself?

I did about two years of research before I started the project. My research consisted of just reading everything I could find about German history, Berlin, etc. All the texts I did consume were translated from German into English, so that limited the material that I had at my disposal. But I just got everything I could from books of art, to maps of the city, books of photographs, novels – anything I could get my hands on. It was until 4 years after I started the project that I actually visited Berlin for the first time – so from beginning researching the project to actually visiting was a period of about six years.

Did you recognize the city from your research?

I did, I was a little apprehensive, no, I was more than apprehensive, I was very anxious — almost terrified — to see the real place, because I was very worried that it would be so different from the story I was trying to tell that it would render what I’d done useless.

But I realized two things: One of them was that what I’d done, or what I had started to do, did feel at least connected to the real city that I saw – that was a relief. And the other thing that I realized was that there was no way I could actually really capture the density, the beauty and the richness of the actual place – and that also was a kind of relief. It is sort of futile to try and capture the spirit of a place – so I was able to just let go of that idea and realized that my version of Berlin is all that my story can be about. In the end, it is going to be my very personal, idiosyncratic notion of what the city is.

One of your main characters in the comic is Kurt Severing, a fictional character, who works for the magazine “Weltbühne”, which was an important critical voice in Germany at that time. Are there translations of their articles into English?

There are translations of select essays by certain writers of the ones that would become a little more well-known. I found a great book called “Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals during the Weimar Republic” which talks about the history of the magazine and about Carl von Ossietzky, and goes into some specific details about different writers. So there is some material out there but unfortunately I can’t read any in the original German.

Were there moments when you wished you could?

Definitely, yeah, that would have been great. And actually I tried. I went through a period of time where I made a concerted effort and try to learn. I don’t know if there’s a period when you’re an adult and it’s harder – nothing really stuck. It’s been frustrating and I really felt that it’s a great limitation to my ability to really engage with the subject matter as much as I would like to. It makes me regret only taking one year of German in high school, I tell you that.

Your novel takes place at the time when the  “Roaring Twenties” come to an end. Goebbels arrived in the German capital to lure the workers over to the Nazis, unemployement was rising – what made you choose this scenario?

It was an important idea for me, what it would have felt like to be there at the time, not with the benefit of hindsight. The thing that really drew me to that was the idea that it didn’t have to turn out the way that it did. It was a time when a lot of forces were pushing and pulling. And I don’t think that it was inevitable the way it did. I don’t know if it would been any better if the Communist Party had risen to power; it is obviously hard to figure that out. But I just became very interested in the circumstances that led up to Hitler becoming chancellor. Ultimately it came out of a desire to know more about the circumstances leading up to WWII and the Holocaust. Because I had had a public high school history education in America  and it was …eh… kind of lacking, to say the least.

The third book obviously will be about the rise of the fascists to power – so there will be no happy ending I guess?

We all know how it turns out in the bigger picture. I don’t want to have it be unrelentingly bleak. I want to try to be as honest to events as I can, but also to show that human experience in the darkest time is not all the stuff of depression. I do want to end it on a positive note, even knowing the events that have transpired. So I have a plan how to do that and we we’ll see how it will comes out at the end.

In the comic you sometimes show  bits of the daily life of people, which are not really important for the story as a whole – like a girl living on the street , or the Nazi Horst Wessels, who got famous after he got murdered. How did you get in the minds of these people, where did you get it from?

After absorbing all the information that I could , and after all the reading that I had done, I was trying to have an imaginary version of the city in my head, and ideas sort of occured to me. All of the characters are initially inspired by a photograph. In the case of Silva, the girl that you are talking about, I found a  book about German culture and there were some photographs of different aspects, different people in different circumstances. There was a picture of a German girl that appealed to me very much. So I took that picture and tried to make a copy of it. Then I put the photograph aside, and redrew the character from the drawing I made until she felt like more of a person, until I had a sense of who she might be. With all of my characters – there’s always a picture that I start with. And as I redraw that picture they sort of merge with my imaginary version of the city. And then the lives that they lead and the things that they do – I have to invent a lot and imagine circumstances or situations that might have happened to them.

You can do all the research that you want, but that act of imagining, making the leap from cold history to something that feels more alive – if people respond to the work at all, that’s what they respond to, the attempt to bring all that stuff to life.

What would you say is the point in time when things could have gone in a different direction back then?

There is no way that I can point to one thing. When I look at any volatile period in history, it is like a web, it’s like chaos theory – everything is interconnected and the smallest change somewhere could affect things elsewhere. It would be hard to pick one thing, but if Horst Wessel hadn’t been shot things would have unfolded differently, not that differently, but just as an example. He could have survived that, it didn’t had to turn out the way that it did. He probably would have still been considered some kind of martyr for just being shot. But the fact that he died really added energy and power to what the National Socialists did afterwards. And earlier than that: Karl Liebknecht und Rosa Luxemburg, they were forces of serious change; they had a lot of ability to get things done. If things had turned out differently for them, it would have been a different picture.

Which books would you recommend on Berlin?

For me one of the great influences and just a great experience was “Berlin Alexanderplatz” by Döblin. That was just a wonderful textured depiciton of not only Berlin at the time, but it has the feeling of what it must have felt like for the world to be changing so quickly with increased urban density and advances in technology. That book really captures the feeling of a modernizing, chaotic, changing world. And portraying people in the midst of that in a very affecting way. If people are really interested in thats period that is the one book that I would recommend to read.