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Cadence Spanish

AI audio lessons to learn Spanish

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Hey!I'm Ali, and I built a tool to help me learn Spanish. There's a good amount of info in the about page, but the short version is that I found apps like Duolingo completely useless. In theory they're designed to help you speak a language but I found it mostly helped my muscle memory tap the right parts of a screen without really learning to say anything. Or more importantly prepare me for how fast a native Spanish speaker speaks!After giving up on Duolingo I tried a few different things; Pimsleur, Paul Noble and Language Transfer. These are all great in different (but similar) ways and after listening to them in the car for a few months, the next time I went to Spain I was able to hold (very) basic conversations and even book a table at a nearby restaurant over the phone without saying a single word of English.I also tried ISSEN (a YC startup I saw posting here that advertises itself as an AI language tutor) and found it to be... underwhelming. It spoke at much too high a level for me and I think asked me about pets or something? When I said I didn't have a dog it completely ignored that and asked what breed of dog it was. I've used a few different "voice-native" AI agents and even the ones in English left a lot to be desired in terms of interruptions, understanding and memory. It also doesn't help with the one time in my life that I actually have time to learn Spanish, which is when I'm driving my car.So I decided to try and recreate the Language Transfer/Paul Noble style learning approach, but letting you write an AI prompt to create a lesson suited to your interests and learning level.https://cadencespanish.com/Any feedback would be great!In terms of tech stack, I used Lovable and Supabase. I wrote some of the copy by hand but none of the code. I use ElevenLabs for the realtime speech-to-text and Google Cloud for the text-to-speech (it's an awful lot cheaper and sounds quite good). I am a software developer (I work for a totally unrelated YC backed startup) but I've somewhat fallen in love with Lovable for how fast I can go from "huh, I wonder if this would work" to something in production. And ironically I learned the most about React and react-router-dom from a previous time when Lovable built something that went so wrong I had to dig into the code and rewrite bits of it.

HN · launched Jan 14, 2026 · 7 upvotes (top 65%) · 0 views

Niche: language learning apps · 511 launches, 56 in the last 7 days ▼ -3% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Education
  • Content generation
  • B2C
  • AI-native
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes An interactive language tutor can be built by connecting a web/mobile UI to modern speech-to-text, LLM prompt pipelines, and text-to-speech APIs (e.g. OpenAI Realtime or ElevenLabs).

Discussion

4 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: ChatGPT with voice chat for language practice

Concerns raised: WebSocket timeout issues with speech-to-text, App freezes after user repeats phrases instead of progressing, Sign-up modal doesn't appear at end of trial lesson

Feature requests: Add retry logic for WebSocket timeouts

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 463 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #213 of 464 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 77 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.