The bird moved in
Last issue we showed you a paper crane and said she was not live yet.
She is now. She flies around the app, perches on things, remembers where she likes to sit, and only speaks Japanese you have already learned.
There is also a new voice engine behind every example sentence, six moods to hear them in, and a free week that never asks for a card.
Busy couple of weeks.
A companion, not a banner ad
The crane is out of the workshop and into the app. Her name is Ori.
She flies, she perches, she has favorite spots. She is hand-drawn frame by frame. She follows you around and, when she feels like it, has something to say about what you are doing.
The part we spent the most time on is when she says nothing. She is banned from generic encouragement (there is a literal blocklist with "Great job!" and "You're on fire!" on it), so if she speaks, it is about your real streak or the thing you just missed. Dismiss a line twice and it is gone for two months. She goes quiet during a session. She can be switched off entirely, and she will not make a scene about it.
And she only speaks Japanese you have already learned. No おかえり before お帰りなさい. Her vocabulary grows as yours does, which means she starts out barely speaking the language and ends up fluent in it alongside you.
She is also a bit cheeky. We are choosing to consider that a feature.
You can now choose the mood Kumi reads to you in
Six of them: Neutral, Cheerful, Sad, Calm, Energetic, Dramatic. Switchable any time from audio settings or the voice popover on any card, on both voices.
This is possible because every example sentence now goes through a completely new speech engine. It sounds like a person. Natural rhythm, real intonation, none of the flat robot cadence you have been putting up with.
And it is still accurate, which was the hard part. Our curated readings drive the pronunciation directly, so what you hear is what the furigana says. No engine guessing at 市場.
Go play a sentence. Then switch it to Dramatic and play it again. Then tell us which mood you are maining.
One note: the first play of any given sentence takes a second while the new engine records it. After that it is instant, for you and for everyone else.
Some of you have been giving us excellent feedback, here is what came out of it
The dictionary was 403ing people. Our bot protection was matching on something that caught real humans, Linux users especially. It can now tell the difference between a bot and someone who just really likes kanji.
Anki imports were failing. A hosting size limit was rejecting decks outright. Rebuilt. Decks up to 50 MB import cleanly now. Uncheck "Include media" when you export; Kumi only needs the scheduling data, and most decks are a few MB without it.
Phantom reviews. Thousands of cards that showed as due and then never loaded. Gone, along with the bug that kept making them. Your due count means something again.
Reset and level-setting were a trap. Resetting progress has no cooldown now, and changing your JLPT level is available again after an hour instead of seven days. Made a mistake? Just fix it.
Speaking practice could not hear you. If you ever said a word perfectly and got "We didn't catch that", that was us. Short sounds fell through entirely, and on iPhone it was worse than that. Fixed. Say あ. It hears あ.
You can now start a free week of Kumi without typing a card number
This was the loudest single piece of feedback we got, and it was right. Asking for payment details before someone knows what they are getting turns a trial into a test of whether you trust us, which is not what a trial is for.
So: seven days, unlocked, no card, decide at the end. If it turns out not to be for you, you found that out for free and we never had your details in the first place.
While we were in there, the plans got names. Starter (Crane), Core (Tiger), Mastery (Kirin). Locked domains now show you their real requirement instead of trying to sell you something.
You have been telling us things, and we have been listening
Since we opened the doors, an enormous amount of genuinely useful feedback has come our way. Detailed, specific, patient, occasionally brutal, and consistently worth reading.
We are working our way through all of it. A great deal of what shipped these last two weeks came directly out of it, and so did most of what we are building right now. There is more in the queue than fits in one issue, and we are getting to it steadily.
If you have sent us something, it landed. If you have not, the door is open.
That’s it for this week.
Which mood would you actually want a language read to you in, and what does that say about how you study?
— The Kumi Team