A few weeks ago I thought we were done enough to open the beta.

The core loop worked end to end. You record a sentence you actually need, Antheo translates it into the way people really talk and gives it a natural voice, and then you loop it until it comes out of your mouth without translating in your head first. That is the whole idea, and it was working. I was using it every day.

Then I showed it to my co-tester, who is nine.

The veto

Theodore listened to a sentence, said it back, listened again, said it back again, and then looked at me the way kids look at you when a thing is boring and they have decided not to hide it.

“I already know this one. How do I check?”

That was the problem in one question. Listening and repeating is great for the moments you can’t look at a screen. I do it on dog walks and while I’m doing the dishes. But it never tells you whether the sentence has actually stuck. You feel like you know it right up until a real person asks you something and it’s gone. Theodore wanted to test himself, and he wanted something to look at while he did. He said, plainly, that we should not let anyone try the app until we fixed that.

He was right, so we didn’t.

What we built because a nine-year-old was bored

Two things went into the Train hub before we sent a single invite.

Flashcards. Your sentence on one side, the answer on the other. Reveal it, then rate yourself: did you get it, or not. You can run them either direction, English to Spanish when you want to produce, Spanish to English when you want to read. Nothing clever, just the honest self-check that looping alone can’t give you.

Fill-in-the-blank. This is the one Theodore actually asked for, and it’s the one he still plays the most. Antheo pulls a sentence from your own library, blanks out a word, and asks you to choose it. The trick is where the wrong answers come from: they’re other words you have used, matched to the same part of speech, so the choices are close enough to make you think. It gets harder as you go, and it waits until you’ve built up enough sentences before it turns on, because a quiz of three cards isn’t a quiz.

Both of them are built entirely out of your own sentences. There’s no separate word list to grind through, no content pack. The quiz is your life, handed back to you with one word missing.

Two people, the same cards, different apps

What surprised me is how differently we use the same deck now.

I still live in Audio Loop. I add about five sentences a day, mostly things I wanted to say at the dog park and couldn’t, and I drill them hands-free while I’m walking or washing up. Theodore barely touches the audio. He goes straight to fill-in-the-blank and treats it like a game he’s trying to beat. Same sentences, same app, two completely different ways in.

I don’t think I would have built his half on my own. Left to me, the app would have been a very good tool for exactly one kind of learner: the one who thinks like me. It took a bored kid to point out that repetition without a way to test yourself gets old fast, and that some people need to see the words, not just hear them.

That’s the part of building this with him I didn’t expect. He isn’t a mascot on the About page. He’s the tester who won’t pretend something is fun when it isn’t, which turns out to be the most useful person to have in the room.

Come break it

The beta is open on iPhone and iPad, invite-based so we can keep it small and actually answer what people tell us. It’s free. We’re looking for about fifteen testers to start, and we’d especially love anyone living in Spain or planning a move.

If you want in, leave your email and we’ll send you a TestFlight invite. Tell us what’s boring. Theodore already has.

Barcelona, summer 2026.