Using OpenAI API in educational app

Image by Freepik

This is a story about finding a really good use case for AI in an educational app. I think many companies try to add the AI driven features to their digital products nowadays but sometimes they don’t think if it will be beneficial for their users, they just want to add this piece of technology just because it’s a hot topic these months.

I own an app called Mowyty. It’s an app for Ukrainians who want to learn Polish. Please check it out on the App Store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mowyty/id1622156106) and Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mowyty.app).

How is it different or maybe even better than the other, big language learning apps?

1. It’s in Ukrainian so it’s a much easier and hopefully more enjoyable user experience for my target audience than learning a foreign language in English.
2. It focuses on teaching one language. You don’t get distracted or bored and don’t end up switching between 10 or 15 languages like it may happen in the other well known apps.

Mowyty AI

There have been 15 updates in both app versions (iOS and Android) in total since I published the app on the 13th April 2023 but I just released the biggest update so far: I added Mowyty AI — an AI driven feature that will help the users improve their reading and listening skills and at the same time they are given an opportunity to learn the interesting facts about Poland and life in Poland.

Why?

There are 2 reasons why I decided to add an AI driven feature:

1. Nowadays many people talk about AI and also they expect to see something related to AI in the digital products they use on a daily basis. So adding Mowyty AI is a great move from a marketing and a user acquisition perspective.
2. Mowyty AI is available for the users who purchased a Mowyty Pro subscription so it’s making the Pro version of the app more interesting. Hopefully it will increase a number of the paying users.

What?

I spent quite a bit of time on reading articles and watching videos about how people leverage AI in their digital products because I was struggling to find the use cases that would be fully beneficial for the users, not only attractive from a technical perspective. I didn’t want to use AI just because it’s a hot topic at the moment in our industry. Eventually I came up with a great AI use case for Mowyty.

Here is a user flow:

1. User enters a Mowyty AI screen.
2. AI generates a list of the topics related to Poland and life in Poland. The topics are generated in Ukrainian.
3. AI translates all the topics from Ukrainian to Polish so we can display both versions.
4. User chooses one of those topics.
5. AI generates a text about the topic chosen by the user in point 4.
6. User may read the generated text but also may choose the app to read it for them (either a full text or the particular words).

How?

I used OpenAI API (https://platform.openai.com) to build Mowyty AI.

Demo

This is how it looks like on the app:

Final thoughts

I’m really excited that I managed to get this feature out and that it’s making our users’ learning experience even more interesting. I already noticed an increased number of the Mowyty Pro subscribers so I think this validates and confirms at least one of the points from a Mowyty AI -> Why? subsection.

I would be super happy to read about how you leverage AI in your apps and what challenges related to that you face. I faced and am facing some challenges too of course but I will write another post about that :)

Thanks for reading this post and if you would like to get in touch, please feel free to reach out on Twitter https://twitter.com/dammarpol :)