Polly

Polly is a web app for supplementing your language learning. I built it because I wanted to practice my French by speaking with francophones. It is simple: you select the language you are learning and the language you want to learn and we match you with someone who speaks the former language and wants to learn the latter! You are put in a chatroom with a timer and a suggestion of which language you should begin by speaking. When the timer is half-finished, you are prompted to switch to the other language. Polly alone is not enough to learn a language, but if you already have some grasp on the vocabulary and grammar of a language it's the best way to internalize what you've learned. At the moment, only random matchmaking is implemented. More sophisticated pairing algorithms, different chat modes, mobile apps, long-term penpals and more are on the development roadmap.