Online civic classes with AI feedback on spoken English

We are solving access to civic learning on two fronts, providing an online platform for real-time classes and discussions, PLUS on-demand AI-powered corrective English feedback that is private and personalized. Access to civic learning currently occurs through deliberate participation and is often left to the highly educated in places such as Tunisia, where we are conducting our lessons.
The lack of access to civic education has lead to a critical situation in Tunisia, highlighted by a 90% boycott of the recent referendum proposing changes to the constitution. This issue, however, is a drop in the bucket, when we consider the state of democracy across MENA and Africa as a whole, let alone Turkey and Eastern Europe, affecting a upwards of 500 million people.

We believe that a focus on civics via the medium of English education will help people engage no matter where they are in the social hierarchy. Our aim is to penetrate all layers of the population, enabling all members of society to become politically responsible citizens.

Pengguin is a virtual classroom platform with built in AI speech recognition and English language correction. We are browser-based, on AWS cloud servers. Our videoconference rooms are embellished with integrated activities and breakout rooms where the magic happens: the participants themselves discuss the issues at hand as presented by the facilitator. The participants can choose to record their voice for our AI to provide feedback. Each user is given the feedback to help them improve their English communication, to build confidence on their road to fluency and to engage in further discussions. 

In short, we provide facilitated group discussion sessions, with plenty of time for speaking practice and AI feedback.

Pengguin allows for international civic discussion to happen face-to-face at a grass-roots level via our online classrooms created for breakout discussions.

We provide a dose of civics each week, which features among our array of topics for discussion. In each discussion we hold we are able to have a fantastic cross-pollination of ideas and a building up of cross-border friendships.

What makes us unique is that our platform attracts all kinds of people from various educational backgrounds, whether they are interested in civics or not.
Our platform provides affordable English speaking practice with accurate corrections to grammar and pronunciation. We have created our own AI that analyzes the voluntary recordings from our users to provide corrections after each discussion session. We are becoming the civic content and language integrated learning for the emerging economy.

Our team is comprised of me, a medical doctor from Australia who became an English teacher at an international school in Tunisia. I partnered with Aziz, a technically competent software engineer with a background in cybersecurity. He has lived in Tunisia all his life and is actively involved in the Tunisian Cybersecurity CTF-Hackathon team. We have 4 other software engineers as well as 2 pedagogy, community and marketing team members. We were founded and accelerated in Tunisia and we are part of Tunisian entrepreneural impact group, Impact Plus. Tunisia is currently undergoing great domestic and international political challenges with important economic implications.

The low purchasing power and high cost of living in Tunisia makes it very difficult for citizens to connect with native English speakers and make international friends. We have created a solution that is sustainable by leveraging technology to allow for massive live discussion sessions using our breakout rooms and AI-English feedback. We are seeking MIT Solve's support to build on our community with guest speakers who could help foster engaging discussions on our platform. We are also hoping form partnerships with alumni and friends of MIT Solve to grow our community internationally. Finally, it is our desire to work with MIT Solve to receive advice on further building our technology to make affordable civic and linguistic education accessbile to all.

We are bringing together three elements of education in a novel way. Firstly, we conduct online lessons but with a focus on English education using speech recognition and AI technology. Secondly we deliver content that is conducive to reflection and helpful for one's development. Finally, we bring an international social element that allows for people to learn from one another, to voice their opinions, to participate in free discourse, which of course, is the building block of democracy.
We don't only imagine a world where English education is accessible to all, but where people grow by communication and respectful dialogue.
There are many AI tools coming out in the education space, but we are building something that is not only effective but also motivating and interesting. We believe we will thereby change the English education space forever.

In one year
- Enable 1,000 English learners to reach CEFR standard C1 in speaking or IELTS score 7.5 in speaking.
- Enable live video exchanges between 100,000 people.
- Deliver 10,000 hours of civics education and related content.

In five years

- Enable 100,000 English learners to reach CEFR standard C1 in speaking or IELTS score 7.5 in speaking.
- Enable live video exchanges between 10,000,000 people.
- Deliver 1,000,000 hours of civics education and related content.
- Provide scholarships to 10,000 university students and community leaders in MENA and Africa.

The specific indicators we use are: retention.
How many of our users are returning to engage with us daily, weekly and monthly. We ask ourselves if we are delivering something worthwhile to our users. The reason we use this retention to track this is because we believe longitudinal retention leads to the most impact when in comes to language development and cultural exchange. 

We also measure the demographic makeup of our community. We charge very low fees in order to cater to people of all backgrounds.

We are also already international, and it is actually a core part of what we are (to be international), so we measure which countries our platform is more active.

Among other things, our AI also measures progress in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation from our users, which helps us to train our AI model further.

Our core technology is threefold:
1. Web-based videoconference platform incorporating existing enterprise audio visual APIs. We created our own breakout rooms system using React/Typescript and Python. All hosted on AWS. Our virtual classroom allows for teachers and students to meet on our platform with up to 50 people in each class.
2. AI fine-tuned voice recognition and AI corrections based on a fine-tuned large language model.
3. Video indexer. We index videos according to captions and present them along with the corrections.

As an education platform focused on languages and improving human relations, we are actively promoting diversity and inclusion. From the co-founders to our users, we are ethnically and linguistically diverse, welcoming people from all backgrounds. We're in favor of diverse leadership and are about to onboard a female chief operations officer from Tunisia. We wish to continue in our diversity endeavor further with our search for subsequent talent hire in Sub-Saharan Africa.

We're a B2C (primary) and B2B platform.
B2C subscription per individual to access unlimited classes and daily AI feedback for up to 60 minutes of speech.
B2B subscription is per team by tiers with professional human feedback as an added service.

Since our principal product relies on network effect, we wish to approach businesses and release our standalone AI product to finance our classes. We have also raised a small amount of capital to sustain our team and we will show both impact and financial sustainability to attract further venture capital investment.

We have received a grant of 25,000 EURO from the French Institute in Tunisia to pilot our product in the French language.
We also received a pre-seed venture capital funding of 50,000 USD from Oman Technology Fund.