What the business is
Wordy is an iOS app that translates and defines unknown words as you watch movies and TV shows on another screen.
The bet
That a phone app that follows a TV episode by microphone, rather than a browser extension, is the way to learn vocabulary while watching.
How it started
Indie developer Sándor Bogyó, 23, from Budapest, was frustrated at looking up unfamiliar phrases while watching shows in English. He used Language Reactor, a Chrome extension, and concluded a mobile app would make it easier to use a phone while watching TV or a computer.
What happened
Wordy analyses an episode's subtitles with AI, extracts and lemmatizes each word, and uses the phone's microphone and a custom speech recognition model to find where you are in the episode. It uses TMDB for film data and OpenSubtitles.com's API for subtitles, ranks words from Beginner to Proficiency English, and offers flashcards. It costs $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year. An Android version and Spanish were planned for November.
What has to be true
The developer wanted an easier way to look up words while watching shows in English.
A browser extension like Language Reactor does not suit watching on a TV with a phone.
Subtitle and film databases such as OpenSubtitles.com and TMDB make it possible to cover 500,000 titles.
He chose quality over speed when adding languages.
What can be applied
A solo developer can enter a niche by moving a proven desktop tool to the phone, but the app launched with English only while its rival covered all major languages.
Aftermath
As of 2024-09-27 Wordy was live on iOS in English only, with Spanish and an Android version planned for November 2024.
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