The Course Wizard platform harnesses machine learning and artificial intelligence to create a course stemming from the original user input, making it possible to create French and Spanish courses from English, or English courses from Spanish, Japanese and traditional Chinese.

“We hope that Course Wizard will motivate people to learn languages again”

Users can create a course by entering or speaking keywords that represent their interests, adding text or pasting a link. The platform then allows users to pick and choose what vocabulary they want to learn in a foreign language.

Once words are chosen, the app’s algorithms and machine learning can detect which words and phrases the user already knows or needs to practise further.

Mait Müntel, Lingvist co-founder & CEO described Course Wizard as a “revolutionary step” in education technology that allows users a wide scope of personalisation and customisation.

“In the UK, we are unfortunately witnessing a decline in individuals learning languages at universities and colleges… this is perhaps due to instant translations being available, meaning that people are no longer taking the time to comprehensively learn languages and immerse themselves in the cultures of other countries,” he said.

“We hope that Course Wizard will motivate people to learn languages again whilst giving them the freedom to learn them exactly how they want to, meaning they can fully integrate themselves into another country’s culture.”

Paweł Mandera, Natural Language Processing researcher at Lingvist said the complexities of human language still pose a big challenge for machines, but the field continues to improve rapidly.

“With this tool, we apply some of these recent developments to help students learn and teachers teach foreign languages more effectively.

“We hope to improve and expand our technology by integrating more breakthroughs coming from AI and second language learning research,” he added.