The ELSA app was launched in February 2016 with the mission to help people speak English fluently and confidently. English has become a critical skill for career and academic success, and we, the ELSA team, believe everyone deserves an effective and affordable English learning tool.

2017 was an incredible year for us. We watched over 2 million English learners like yourself practice with ELSA in over 100 countries. More than 100 million exercises have been completed on the ELSA app, and 81% of ELSA users reported in our survey that they felt a lot more confident speaking English after they began practicing with ELSA. Thanks to all these and more, ELSA was featured by app stores in 89 different countries, and by Forbes as one of four companies using AI to transform the world.

We watched our team grow. Now we have team members in countries across Asia, Europe, and North America. At any given hour, someone on our team is working hard to deliver a better product to our ELSA community. We believe our lessons should be fun and informative. This year, we released over 100 new lessons on popular topics, including “Job Interview”, “Christmas”, and “Star Wars”! The ELSA app now features 530 lessons in 22 topic areas.

ELSA traveled around the world. A few highlights include being accepted to Google Launchpad in San Francisco, organizing our ELSA 1st Birthday event in Ho Chi Minh City, attending InterSpeech 2017 in Stockholm, and presenting ELSA at the Web Summit in Lisbon.

2017 also marked the beginning of important partnerships with English teachers and schools. As an initiative to benefit both our users and partners, we are integrating our partner’s content into the ELSA app. For example, the recently released module “Practice with Dan Hauer” has been well received by our community of learners. As always, we are truly grateful to all our partners for their enthusiasm for English education and ELSA.

In 2018, we will be releasing several exciting new features that we can’t wait to show you. These include the ability to give you feedback on full sentences, new video lessons, and many more interactive ways to practice speaking English with ELSA.

At ELSA, we believe anyone can speak English fluently and accomplish incredible things in life. Thank you for being a part of the ELSA community. To everyone who contacted us, your comments have been humbling and we’ve learned a lot from you.

Thank you.