SpeakUp Mandarin — an AI tutor that hears your tones and corrects them

What was breaking

Indonesian learners memorise vocabulary for months and still freeze the moment they have to speak. The gap is not knowledge, it is mouth time: nothing in a conventional course makes you say the word out loud and tells you whether the tone landed. A human tutor can, but not for every learner, at every hour, for every sentence.

What we built

We built the practice partner rather than another lesson library. SpeakUp AI listens to every attempt and corrects tone and pronunciation in the moment — patient, unlimited, awake at 2am. The curriculum around it is written to end in speech: each chapter drives at a conversation instead of a vocabulary list, and review is scheduled by the forgetting curve rather than by the calendar.

What changed

The AI sits inside a workflow the learner already has — say it, hear the correction, say it again — rather than as a chat box bolted onto a course. Marketing site, curriculum, and product run on one Next.js codebase, so a change to the method reaches the lesson and the page that sells it in the same deploy.