Copycat Cafe - Learn your next language by copying native speakers
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Most language apps teach you to recognize words. Copycat Cafe teaches you to speak them.
Watch real conversations with voices cloned from native speakers, copy what they say with AI scoring your pronunciation 0-100%, then chat freely with an AI that corrects you without judgment.
15 minutes a day. French and Spanish, more languages coming.
Built by two people who read every email. 1,000+ paying learners, $16k MRR.
Replies
Hey Product Hunt!
Most language apps train you to recognize words. Ours trains you to speak them.
We kept hearing the same story from learners: five years on Duolingo, streak in the hundreds, then they walk into a bakery in Paris (or a café in Madrid) and freeze when someone speaks to them. They understood fine, they just couldn't get a word out in response.
So we rebuilt the app I'd been running solo for a decade around how humans actually learn to talk. Babies don't conjugate, they copy.
The Copycat Method takes about 15 minutes a day:
Watch a real conversation with the text not visible at first. Ears before brain.
Copy each line out loud. AI scores your pronunciation word by word, so you know exactly which sounds need work.
Chat with an AI cat coach to use what you just copied in a real conversation, where the only thing judging you is the score.
What you get out of it: you stop freezing when a native speaker turns to you, your accent stops sounding foreign, and your pronunciation scores climb from around 60% to 90%+ on lines you've copied a few times.
We're at $16k MRR with 1,000+ paying learners. French and Spanish today, with German and Italian on the way and iOS coming too. No VC, no growth team. Just two people who read every email.
Two things I'd genuinely love your take on:
If you've tried language apps before, what made you quit?
What would convince you that an app could actually get you speaking, not just understanding?
Nur and I are here all day. Bring the hard questions.
PS: Code PH30OFF gets you 30% off the annual plan for the next 60 days.
UX Dictionary
Good luck with all of this, @bhouy. You’re doing great stuff with the rebrand!
@toolboxofdesign Thanks Nick, really appreciate it! :). The amazing design assets you created help a lot!
Mailwarm
How do you handle different accents, like does the 0 to 100 score penalize someone for sounding non French?
@thamibenjelloun great question, and a fair thing to worry about. Short version: no, you don’t get penalized just for having an accent.
The score works at the level of individual sounds, not your overall “nativeness.” Your speech is aligned phoneme by phoneme against a reference for the language (French as spoken in France, a neutral Latin American Spanish), and each sound is checked for how close it is to the target. A clear accent is completely fine — what actually pulls a score down is when a sound drifts far enough that it lands as a different sound, or gets hard to follow.
We’ve tested it across thousands of accents and people score well as long as they’re intelligible. The bar is “can a native speaker understand you and recognize the sound you meant,” not “do you sound Parisian.”
Will try - interested how it compares to Duolingo
@moritz_schultz @emerald_springs Have enjoyed using Benjamin's app for several years and love the Copy Cat update. Have used to keep current with French and just started Spanish.
I'm very pleased and grateful to you Benjamin. I am an on/off French student of yours and have always appreciated your accessibility when I had questions or issues. Wishing you great success in this newest iteration of your life's work.
@diane_jones4 thanks you so much Diane! :)
I'm having a great time on CopyCat Cafe taking my rusty 8 years of academic French and, lesson by lesson, turning myself into a much more fluent and colloquial French speaker. I had already mastered the accent. But I never acquired a complete, colloquial vocabulary or the ability to just automatically use right words and expressions, or the ability to understand what native French speakers say, because they talk so fast. CopyCat is really helping me with all of that!
@elizabeth_e_michaud I’m really glad to hear that, that’s exactly what we are aiming for :)
16K MRR with two people is the whole story. The insight that recognition ≠ production is obvious in hindsight but nobody was solving it this way. Used voice cloning extensively for a different project — the pronunciation scoring is the hard part. How are you handling accent variation within a single language?
@joe_rucker mostly by focusing on intelligibility. Meaning you get a good score as long as your accent is understandable to native speakers. Although we do plan on releasing different pronunciation assessments for different language variants.
I was using another online training tool. When I tried to speak French in Canada or in Europe, I would end up switching to English. After using Copycat I am looking forward to trying my French with people who are French. I feel more confident.
Love you app Benjamin - really helps Meg me to express myself more naturally in French.
@jean_nolan I'm really glad to hear that, nothing makes me happier than knowing we help people actually speak French :)