Orphi
Speak your way to fluency. An AI language companion that feels like a friend — witty, proactive, and voice-first.
The Story
If you have read the Echo page, you know the backstory. Two years of Chinese classes at Dartmouth. Homework, flashcards, the whole drill. And I still could not hold a real conversation before going to Beijing.
Echo was my answer to that. An AI tutor that actually makes you speak. The concept was right. The execution was not. I built something that worked, got over a hundred people to try it, learned a ton about voice AI and mobile development. But at the end of the day, I would not use my own app. And if I would not use it, I had no business asking anyone else to.
That was the hardest part. Not the technical failures or the distribution problems. It was looking at something I poured months into and feeling nothing. No excitement to open it. No urge to show it to a friend. Just... fine. And fine is not good enough.
The Rebuild
I shut Echo down and sat with the question for a while. What would make me actually want to practice a language every day? Not out of discipline. Not because some app guilt-trips me with streak notifications. But because I genuinely enjoy it.
The answer was embarrassingly simple: make it feel like talking to a friend. Not a tutor. Not a flashcard machine. A friend who happens to speak Chinese, who knows what I am into, who roasts me when I mess up and hypes me when I get it right. Someone I would actually want to call.
That is Orphi. I rebuilt everything from scratch. New architecture, new design language, new personality system. The only thing I kept from Echo was the lesson I learned: build something you love first. If you would not use it yourself every day, go back to the drawing board.
What Changed
Orphi has personality. Real personality. It is witty, a little sarcastic, and genuinely encouraging. It does not sound like an AI reading from a script. It sounds like that friend who studied abroad and now won't shut up about how fun the language is. That is the vibe.
It is also proactive. Orphi does not wait for you to open the app. It reaches out. Sends you a message. Calls you. "Hey, you free at 7? Let's do a quick session." That shift from passive tool to active companion changed everything. You stop forgetting to practice because Orphi does not let you forget.
And it is contextual. It knows what you are learning, what you struggle with, what your interests are. If you mentioned you love cooking last week, your next conversation might be about ordering food at a restaurant. The learning feels natural because it is woven into things you actually care about.
The App
Home — voice chat
Onboarding
Learn tab
Vocab card
Scan results
Vocabulary
Progress
Features
Object Scanner
Point your camera at anything. Orphi identifies objects, gives you the word in your target language, builds a sentence, and saves it to your vocabulary. Learning happens in context, not in a vacuum.
Structured Lessons
Not just free conversation. Orphi has a real curriculum — vocab cards, pronunciation drills, and spaced repetition. But it never feels like homework because the voice is always there, keeping things light.
Vocabulary Stickers
Every word you learn gets saved as a sticker. Scan objects, finish lessons, have conversations — your collection grows. It is weirdly satisfying to watch your vocabulary pile up.
Progress and Settings
Track your streaks, see your growth, and customize how Orphi talks to you. Want more corrections? Fewer? Want Orphi to be gentler or more blunt? You decide.
Where We Are
Orphi is live on the App Store. French, English, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese are all live. Each one gets the same attention to personality and voice quality because a mediocre experience in any language is not worth shipping.
I am building this in public. The code is on GitHub. If you try it, I genuinely want to hear what you think. What works. What does not. What annoys you. That is how this gets better.