ELSA stands for English Language Speech Assistant and was created by Vu Van and Dr. Xavier Anguera back in 2015 and started to rise in 2016 with over 30,000 downloads. Vu Van, (in the picture) was born and raised in Vietnam. She left and moved to San Francisco where she went on to earn a masters in education and business from Stanford University. This app was created to help non-English speakers sound more like native speakers of North America. As a student in America herself, she found it difficult to fit in and sound American. When she realized she had a product worth creating she teamed up with Dr. Xavier Anguera, who specializes in speech processing. They created an AI that gives one on one instruction time to English-Language-Learners. ELSA listens to the speaker then is able to correct the persons pronunciation.
The subscription to ELSA costs anywhere from $3 to $6 US dollars. So far ELSA has been able to raise $12 million from investors all over the world. In the coming year they plan to partner up with the education field and get more into classrooms. They remind us that ELSA is not replacing teachers it is just a tool that they can use to get extra support.
Dr. Xavier Anguera, Co-founder of ELSA:
See the video attached of Vu Van discussing ELSA.
