September: new version updates, plans for language classroom plan

Etiene Dalcol, September 6, 2023

header

This newsletter’s topics:

🆕 Version 2.2.2 is out!

Click here to download / upgrade. What’s new since Polygloss 2.0:

User Profile

👋 Share your profile link and get 7 days of free Polygloss Unlimited per active player invited. Your friends will also get 7 days of free Polygloss Unlimited when joining through your link. Example: https://polygloss.app/invite/etiene

👥 Follower count

🐞 Fixed character count saving for Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Thai

🐞 Fixes wrong number of stars showing on player profile

Match

✨ Better algorithm for matching players and selecting lessons

⭐️ Match result screen improvements: link to player profiles, corrections, awards received

📢 Added Listening support to more languages. Besides the languages supported by your phone, the following languages are now supported: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voices

👋 Hints improvements: added link to user profile and text actions such as translating, bookmarking and awarding

👩‍🏫 Added tutorial to show people they can use hints, switch images, or respond with audio when the match inviter already unlocked it

🧪 (AB test) 🔤 Use paid google cloud translate API instead of regular google translate

🧪 (AB test) ▶️ ‘Respond match’ button below the ‘Start Match button’ to answer a queued match instead of being passively redistributed a match that wasn’t answered

🐞 Fixes translation button for Hebrew and other languages

🐞 Fixes issue that forced users to enter a space or reselect image after copy pasting text into match description form

🐞 Fixes error when recording audio then switching tabs

🐞 Fixes error loading matches from some players

🐞 Fixes error saving when match is complete

🐞 Fixes error when loading edited match

Friends Tab

👥 See who's following you

🔎 Searching friends by name is no longer case sensitive

▶️ Play button on friend search results

Library

👯 Show who you wrote to when seeing your own text history

✨ Added link to player profiles when seeing corrections and bookmarks

🐞 Fixes issue that forced some players to reopen the app to show unlocked lessons

🐞 Fixes wrong image saved when saving a correction

Review

🐞 Fixes fill-the-gap review criteria for Hebrew, Mandarin, Japanese and other languages

🐞 Fixes error loading hints and reviews

Other

✨ Moved explore card to the side menu when completed

✨ Show terms of use and privacy policy on subscription screen

✨ Added retries around the app to stop errors caused by temporary connectivity issues

🐞 Fixes error with energy filling on account creation

🐞 Fixes issue saving autocorrect settings

🐞 Fixes error with splash screen getting stuck on certain phone screen sizes

🐞 Stop showing subscription price options and show subscription management button to subscribers

🐞 Fixes error when checking for username uniqueness

🐞 Fixes error switching screen at the end of tutorial

🐞 Fixes error saving selected languages

♿️ Fixes match form font size on large fonts

♿️ Various layout improvements for smaller phone screens or larger fonts

💻 Improve error logging

🧪 (AB test) 🔤 Use pre-made language list when clicking on “Other” while selecting languages

 🔜 Polygloss for classrooms

Are you a language teacher or do you run a language school? Would you like for your students to have more opportunity to practice languages after class? Get Polygloss Unlimited for your students at an incredible pricing point and let’s chat about which new features would be useful for you as a teacher.

Benefits:

Pricing:

Please note these prices vary per country or region, get in touch for prices outside of the euro zone

Register your interest here or book a chat on my calendly if you want to discuss alternative pricing schemes.

Polygloss Unlimited

Features:

🎁 Everything from the free Polygloss version: play an image guessing game to practice languages, get points and unlock topics

⚡️ Unlimited energy points to use on translations, reviewing, saving a text to your library and more

📢 Listen button and special listening exercises (supports 40+ languages)

🎤 Audio recording (send and receive audio messages during matches)

👑 A special VIP crown on your username

Click here to see the full breakdown between free and paid features.

Pricing:

We have a pay-what-you-can scheme with different tiers of pricing according to your affordability adjusted per country / region. There is no difference in the subscription features between these tiers. There are monthly, yearly, and lifetime plan. The possibility to buy a lifetime subscription is not going to be unlocked to all players forever, so get yours while you can!

Discussion Forum

Polygloss now has a discussion forum on Reddit where the community can interact with each other, discuss language learning, talk about Polygloss, suggest features, contribute to the wiki, report bugs, etc. I hope you enjoy it!

Top ten tips for working with (an enjoying) languages

(Short read) In this blog post, Chrislinguist shares his experience about how he got into languages to begin with.

Weizenbaum’s nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI

(Long read) This article by Ben Tarnoff covers the history of chatbots with magnificent insights. Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence – but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans.

Polygloss statistics

In the last month, 1090 Polygloss players wrote 30,926 texts in 71 languages!

Top languages in average per player:

Highlights of last month:

What did you think of these updates? Drop a comment below, we’d love to hear your thoughts 👇

Etiene is a Software Engineer who is passionate about languages. She recently finished her MSc. in Computer Science researching Computational Linguistics and Computer Assisted Language Learning.