For Roy Mor, improving his English was a frustrating experience. So was trying to teach himself Arabic and French. But while most people probably would have ditched the attempt, he cofounded a company to tackle the issue.

“The idea came from our personal frustration with learning languages. Personally speaking, I didn’t have any opportunity to speak English, and also no one to speak it to,” he tells ISRAEL21c.

“We thought it be great if everyone had an AI personal tutor in their pocket that they could just talk to about whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted.”

This thought led Mor and his best friend from his army days, Yonti Levin, to found Loora (“language” in Arabic), a generative AI-based app that enables users to converse in English on their preferred topic and practice situations such as job interviews or work meetings, all while receiving feedback on their grammar and pronunciation.

Technological breakthroughs in the field of natural language processing in 2020 allowed the two to start working on their dream project. As developers with a background in machine learning, they founded the company at the end of 2020 and began building the app themselves.

“The problem was that if your English was already above a very basic level, and the level that you need is a really high one, then no good solutions existed,” Mor notes.

“On the one hand, there are great apps, such as Duolingo, which is an amazing company, that bring you from not knowing anything to knowing a little bit. They’re aimed at casual learners, so if you want to travel to Italy and order coffee in Italian then they’re wonderful. But if you want to work in English, then they’re not relevant.”

Private tutors, on the other hand, are expensive. “And there’s a lot of friction – you need to set a lesson in advance, and talk to someone about something that you don’t necessarily want to. It also embarrasses people and prevents them from approaching the issue.”

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