Forvo Pronunciation Guide - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

We have some coding experience indeed, but, above all, we try to provide a service to our forvers. Consequently, we focus more on trying to add value to them in terms of learning and perfecting languages or simply helping them pronounce words or phrases correctly.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

The challenge has been enormous, especially making the usual functions of Forvo, as well as the new tools, simpler and more usable. Moreover, the changes have been important internally, so the challenge has been greater. Getting it right visually has also been important, but we knew that we were going to meet the challenge by being in permanent contact with our forvers.

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The interview was answered by the CEO of Forvo Media SL. Forvo is the largest pronunciation guide in the world, the place where you'll find millions of words and phrases pronounced in their original languages.
In 2008, Forvo was founded with the mission of improving spoken communication across cultures by creating a platform where users could share pronunciations of words in their native language and listen to words pronounced by other native speakers. Today, Forvo is the largest online reference for pronunciations with a database of nearly 6 million words pronounced in over 430 languages – all created and maintained by native speakers.

Forvo continues to work toward its mission as a go-to reference for authentic word pronunciations through over 110 million site visits annually and over 800,000 registered users. In 2013, Forvo was included in Time Magazine’s “50 Best Websites of the Year.”

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

There are many favourite apps, but especially those that directly improve the day-to-day life of people without spending a lot of user time. Today and increasingly, people's time is a precious commodity and everything that adds value quickly is welcome. It would not be fair to name just a few of them.

How long have you been working on this app?

Normally, the improvement of an app is the result of detecting improvements that can add value to users, so we can say that the task is constant. Yet there is a time when we reflect the improvements detected in a new version, when we understand that they can benefit a significant number of users. We have carried out the actual development of the new version until it is made available to users in the different Stores in about 3 months, although later new versions with minor improvements continue to be uploaded.

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

Many forvers told us that they wanted to know the specific pronunciations of other specific forvers, especially because the voice of a certain forver seemed interesting to them. Hence, being able to follow other users to know the pronunciations that this forver may have made was a necessity that we had to contribute.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

We believe that, when learning a language, it is important to get used to the voice of different people and to different accents, since the usual reality that a person encounters when dealing with a language other than the native one is to talk to different people, each with their features. In this sense, being able to have words and phrases pronounced multiple times is a value that other apps do not have. If there is also the option of requesting a new pronunciation when the existing ones are not enough or do not convince one of our forvers, we believe that we have an important value contribution there.

Let's also think about communication professionals, how many times have we heard journalists refer to foreign personalities and horribly pronounce that person's name? With Forvo anyone can instantly know how to correctly pronounce that person's name or request it if we do not have this name yet (the latter is already difficult today given the volume of recordings we have).

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

Our forvers increasingly demand that we incorporate online teachers to be able to go to them. They demand that we provide a more complete service, going from giving added value only with pronunciations to creating a complete language learning ecosystem. And we are working on it, for the first months of 2023 we want to answer to these needs, but always with the focus of adding value to our forvers.

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

We want to thank them for having contributed to making Forvo what we are today, we have always felt the affection of our forvers and we are proud to be able to move forward every day with more enthusiasm.

And we would like to ask them to continue trying to contribute to us in the future as they have done up to now. It would also be great if they continue to treat us just as well, contributing new ideas and helping to spread this project, which is a project of all and for all.