Trips to South America helped a pair of lifelong best friends from Northampton realize a love of learning Spanish. Now, they’re turning that passion into an app to help other people learn the language and make connections.
Reed Young and Ethan Gorman, who graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2021, recently launched Avita, a free artificial intelligence-powered mobile app for Spanish language learning.
Following graduation, Young and Gorman moved to Boston and worked full-time jobs. About nine months ago, however, they realized they needed to get out of Massachusetts. After living in the state their entire lives, they realized they wanted a change of scenery — a new adventure.
So they quit their jobs and moved to Argentina.
“It was absolutely amazing,” said Young, who is also currently pursuing his master’s at UMass’ Isenberg School of Management. “But what happened about a month and a half in was, I was taking classes, in-person, in Buenos Aires and Ethan wasn’t, but we both found that there [weren’t] actually as many opportunities to practice as we had hoped. We’d always heard immersion is the way to learn, immersion is how you will gain fluency, and a month and a half in, Ethan and I still, on a day-to-day basis, weren’t practicing as much as we wanted to.”
At the time, AI was beginning to gain popularity, and Gorman started dabbling with it, talking with Meta AI through WhatsApp, albeit about an unrelated project.
“I was like, ‘I’m just going to have this conversation in Spanish. Why not? It’s my way of practicing Spanish,’” he said.
Through his usage, he found that his conversations made him use verb tenses he didn’t use much in everyday conversation, and they also taught him new vocabulary words.
“He said, ‘You know, this is really, really useful,’” Young recalled. “‘Don’t you think we could find some use cases for learning Spanish through AI?’”
Their new (temporary) home — which they chose because Gorman’s girlfriend is from Argentina and has family there — inspired the app’s name. In Buenos Aires, Gorman lived across the street from the Museo Evita, the museum honoring Eva “Evita” Peron.
One day, he needed to apply for something with an email address that had a custom domain, and he got the idea for the name “Avita” while he was sitting on his balcony. After he purchased the domain, he didn’t intend to keep it beyond the app’s first iteration, but he kept using it more and more until “the whole app got built on it,” Gorman said.
“I was like, ‘Well, we’re stuck with it! It’s here!” he laughed. “No changing it now!’”
After three months, once their visas expired, Gorman and Young came back to Northampton for a summer and worked long hours at carpentry jobs to save money. After that, they took another immersion trip — this time, to Ecuador, where they produced a beta version of the app. In the development process, they had a mantra: “We became beginners again.”
“We were like, ‘How are we going to make a Spanish app if we don’t speak perfect Spanish?’” Gorman said. “But at the same time, we’re our target audience — if it works for us, it probably works for a lot of people.”
The two returned to Massachusetts in December. The app launched publicly on Thursday, Jan. 29 at a free community language and culture exchange event, “intercambio,” at Sunset Cantina in Boston.
“The launch was a fantastic turnout!” Young said. “There was lots of joy in the restaurant, people felt comfortable practicing Spanish, and a strong sense of community emerged almost immediately around the shared connection to Spanish.”
Each lesson begins with a written explanation of the subject matter, followed by an exercise in which users must answer questions via their microphones. The first lesson for “A1 learners” on the app explains cognates. For example, words like “normal,” “personal” and “final,” which mean the same thing in English and Spanish but have different pronunciations. The user then has to translate English sentences like “It is cultural” into Spanish.
A lesson for “B1 learners” asks the user to describe, through voice dictation, “an unexpected evening in an apartment where you used to live,” using the imperfect tense, which describes past actions that were ongoing or habitual.
Compared to, for example, free language-learning platform and app Duolingo, Gorman said Avita has the advantage of providing learning opportunities that are more relevant to real-world conversational usage. However, both apps have a “streak” feature that counts how many consecutive days that a user finishes a lesson (or multiple lessons).
“From day one, we’re making you talk. There’s a microphone and you’re talking into it, where[as], with Duolingo, you’re pressing a button and it’s a fill-in-the-blank or ‘What’d you hear?’ And that’s just not how your brain’s actually going to process it when you go into the real world,” Gorman said.
“I think there’s this trope of people who have a 1,500-day streak on Duolingo, and they land in Spain or something, they’re like, ‘What? What’d they say? I can’t say anything.’ And there’s a reason for that,” he continued. “That’s because, okay, you could rearrange words. You could do multiple choice. You could do matching. You could do fill-in-the-blank. But [with Avita], when that moment comes, you’re pulling a full sentence out of your brain.”
The two designed their lessons in conjunction with tutors and teachers they met from Argentina. The role of app’s AI is to listen to a user’s audio responses and let them know if there were any errors. It can also generate a stack of flashcards on any theme — such as travel vocabulary or medical terminology — accompanied by relevant AI art. Users have the option to flag a message or lesson if it’s incorrect.
Naturally, Gorman and Young are aware of concerns and criticism of AI, but they aren’t dissuaded from making it a fundamental part of their app — exactly the opposite, in fact. As Young sees it, “AI is going to exist whether we use it or not,” so he and Gorman want to make sure they use it as ethically as possible.
“When I realized that we could use AI to bridge people together, there was no negative stigma in my mind,” he said. “Our whole purpose of AI, in this case, is to bring people together through conversation. You’re only learning Spanish if you want to communicate with somebody else, and if we can ease that process and help people learn Spanish, then to me, AI is being used as a tool, and I think it’s more about creating that narrative of, ‘How can we use it?’”
Still, Gorman pointed out, learning a language on an app is not a substitute for real-world immersion.
“At some point, you’re going to have to start reading Spanish books, listening to Spanish podcasts, and eventually, hopefully, go out and travel somewhere Spanish-speaking, or find someone local who speaks Spanish and have the real conversation,” he said. “I think it all comes down to the connection part, and if we’re going to use AI to get there faster and connect more people, I’m all for it.”
In fact, they see Spanish language learning as a particular necessity for the current sociopolitical climate — namely, in response to ICE raids that have shaken up immigrant communities, especially those from Spanish-speaking countries.
“Spanish isn’t a foreign thing here,” he said, “and we want to make people feel comfortable.”
Now that Avita has launched, the two are preparing for another trip: this time, they’re going to Bolivia in mid-February to continue learning Spanish and getting more ideas for their app. When they come back home, they want to host events in the Valley — including at UMass — to promote Avita and share their passion for language-learning.
“I never thought, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m one of those people who could learn seven languages,’” Young said. “I never felt that way. And I was like, ‘I don’t know how these people go out here and learn languages.’ But then to feel the process happening, I’m like, ‘Okay, I see the path. I see how it’s possible,’ and it’s so satisfying and so fun, because it happens quicker than you think.”
Avita is available on the App Store. To learn about about future Avita events and updates, visit instagram.com/Avita.app.