Big things are on the horizon for Glossika.
We've spent a lot of effort working on our apps over the last few years: Glossika came to iOS in 2022 and to Android in 2023. Those were important steps for us to take and we're proud to now be available on pretty much any platform you might pick up, but we're also excited for the near future. Now that our apps are out, there are all sorts of features and quality-of-life adjustments we'd like to bring to Glossika.
If a particular feature catches your eye, sign up for a free trial to try it out! It's totally free for 7 days, gives you access to all three of our platforms (web, iOS, Android), and doesn't require a credit card.
What we've released in 2023 so far
To keep things short and sweet:
- Android: Our Android app is out!
- Billing: The Basic (one-language) Plan is now available for purchase via iOS, and our pricing page is clearer than it used to be
- Web: Our home page and our language-specific landing pages were updated; our affiliate program also got a bit of love
Updates to expect over the next several months
There's a lot of cool stuff on our roadmap, but here are a few specific things that are (a) almost ready to be released and (b) easy to show in a picture.
Revamped onboarding experience (iOS)
Glossika is a pretty complex product under the hood: Lots of theory and decades of practical linguistics experience has gone into it. Interacting with users via email and social media during the last few years, we've slowly realized just how real the curse of knowledge is.
To address this, we've redesigned Glossika's new-user experience from the ground up. When signing up for an account, you'll now work through a small tutorial that shows what Glossika is trying to do for you and how you can get the most out of your training sessions.
In brief, we're striving to reduce the language learning process down to the press of a single button.
Customizable playlists
In the past, the only way to save a sentence for later was to "heart" it, thus adding it to a list of your favorite sentences. Having said that, there are many other reasons that you might want to keep track of a sentence, and we think you should be able to do so. Soon you'll be able to make a variety of playlists and customize them to your choosing.
Some example playlists you might want to make:
- "Difficult" sentences that need a bit of extra attention
- Sentences that seem like they'll be especially useful during an upcoming trip
- Sentences that contain a specific grammar point
Revamped web dashboard
The process of creating our Android and iOS apps forced us look hard at what information was critical for users to have at their fingertips and what parts of the dashboard people were actually interacting with. Those lessons are reflected in a reskinned dashboard for our web platform. It's cleaner, easier to take in at a glance, and generally more intuitive.
Expanded settings menu
As we've talked with users, we found that people were using Glossika in quite a few different ways:
- Some people do indeed follow our default Full-practice Mode settings
- Some people use Glossika primarily as a tool to do shadowing while commuting/doing chores/etc
- Some people set really long intervals between audio clips and focus on translating sentences
- Some polyglots speedrun it to refresh their memory in languages they haven't spoken in awhile
- Some people do impressive things with the Collection page in order to cram reps and/or try to replicate the approach of our old CD programs
- Some people use it to explore grammar points in context
- Some people see it as a comparatively low-effort way to get exposure to a new language: there are no questions or comprehension checks (in Listening-only Mode) to interrupt the audio flow
We'd like to accomodate these different types of people. We're reconsidering our session logic and thinking about other modes to add, but for the time being, we've simply decided to give users more control over what their Glossika sessions look like.
Offline mode for Android
We weren't quite able to fit offline functionality into our initial app launch. It'll be here soon.
Again, this is just the start. Big changes will be coming to Glossika in 2023, including more content!
