Liulishuo: A New Era of Learning with AI

Ben Hu, Co-Founder & CTO

Liulishuo, a Chinese technological company, hosts the world’s largest speech bank of Chinese people speaking English. Its flagship product, Liulishuo mobile app, equipped with the world's first “AI English Teacher,” assists non-native English speakers to improve their speech and elocution of the language through deep learning and adaptive learning. It now has over 70 million registered users, covering 379 cities in China and 175 countries around the world.

A brief insight into Liulishuo

White collar jobs seekers are required to improve English language communication skills to overcome the possibility of being cast off as English-proficient peers appear to get ahead start in the employment sector. Most young people in China have difficulty in approaching and communicating in a second language, primarily English. Addressing this gap, Liulishuo, established in 2012, created the first of its kind self-developed “AI English Teacher” based on deep learning. The app was released in 2013 and accepted by masses. Liulishuo also received numerous awards that year, along with the highly acclaimed Apple’s “App Store Essentials” and “Best Apps of the Year.” The app reached the 1 million users benchmark in August 2013, making it an excellent start. In 2014, it was updated with newer features, including the community feature so that people can interact with each other, share information and post achievements.

Another critical moment was in July 2016, when Liulishuo released its paid content - AI core course in the form of AI English teacher. It took the team at Liulishuo 18 months to build quality content that caters to the need of every individual. Its business value lies in its user value; therefore the user content had to be precise, simple and of finer quality. In Feb 2017, half a year after this release, Liulishuo became the first online education tech company in China to achieve scalable profitability.

Evolution of the AI in the organization

The company began coding almost six years ago, the time when the mobile web was already picking up momentum. During the start of Liulishuo, AI firms were not enthusiastic about any mobile web and education integration. Technological trends usually began from the messaging apps with social networks and utility tools like Google maps; then it disperses to the other verticals. Despite education technology being a lucrative sector, not much has been done on this side of the industry across the globe.

At present, numerous companies are focusing on the education sector, implementing AI and deep learning. Liulishuo’s approach is slightly different because the company does not restrict its development strictly to AI/DL/ML.

We also provide personalized learning contents for users, employing visual logic to improve their language skills

It harnesses every new technology and tries to apply that to its products. The team at Liulishuo seeks to understand every aspect of a user need. Currently, implementing voice recognition in the app is the company’s main priority, as it will help users to improve their pronunciations and speeches. At the core, Liulishuo is still a technology company and continues to discover innovative methods to create an enjoyable learning experience for everyone.

Liulishuo’s flagship offering

Liulishuo users praise its flagship product "Liulishuo" app. “Engaging, effective and user-friendly” are some of the compliments received from the English learning app. The combination of advanced auto-scoring engine, adaptive learning system, comprehensive learning materials, and well-designed leveled games enables users to learn and communicate English with ease.

Liulishuo later launched the paid content—AI Core Course in July 2016, an AI English teacher based on Deep Learning and Adaptive Learning technology.

It also provides personalized learning content for users, employing visual logic to improve their language skills. AI English teacher can instantaneously recognize users’ spoken English, accurately score and precisely cater the learning materials to their needs.

AI Core Course has 1 million paid users. Users on average spend five hours per week studying, and the overall course completion rate is more than 90 percent.

Liulishuo also released the Professional Solutions to Enterprise English Learning to provide corporate employees with personalized, convenient, interesting English training. Its well-known clients include Four Seasons, Coca-Cola, TCL, Ctrip, Tencent, etc. One feedback the company received from Coca-Cola was that over 45 percent of their employees moved 1 level up after four months of studying.

Levels of English learning expertise

Everybody requires a good teacher or educator, which is very hard to find. Technology is providing learners or students an advantage of learning without a teacher. The actual evaluation of a learner’s progress is provided by the Placement Test, an accurate and precise grading system. It places users into one of the eight Levels, providing content optimally suited to their level. AI algorithm analyzes the data and learning behavior of individual users to optimize the content received in real-time. Content is introduced incrementally in a systematic way, allowing users to make meaningful progress in a short period.

According to a study using the TOEIC Bridge Test from ETS, the users have achieved triple the learning efficiency as compared to human teachers by CEFR standards (Common European Framework of Reference for Language, an international standard for describing language ability).

Roadmap

Besides the AI core course, Liulishuo is also preparing the next generation education curriculum, especially those targeting K-12 and test preparation.

Also, China is now extrapolating its own AI development plan (Source: China’s Ministry of Science and Technology website). Following its validation by 2020, the country will host over 1 trillion RMB R&D centered AI industries and Liulishuo, as an AI company, need to be more innovative and productive to be part of this great nation-wide development.