August was a busy month on web, with a brand new navigation panel rolling out to everyone along with a number of Lynx improvements and import upgrades. There was a good Android release too, and we continue to make progress on the bigger projects we mentioned last month.
Web
- New navigation panel. The side navigation has been rebuilt and is now live for everyone. It expands and collapses, shifts the page rather than covering it so you can leave it open, keeps your recent lessons and chats close at hand, and includes a universal search with your search history. Your streak, coin and multiplier counters now update live as you study instead of only on refresh.
- AI reformatting in the lesson editor. When an import comes in with broken paragraphs, stray line breaks or typos, you can now run it through our AI re-formatter to clean it up rather than fixing it by hand.
- Import YouTube lessons from more places. You can now import an external YouTube lesson directly from the Library, from search results and from a course page, instead of going to the importer first.
- Adding audio during import is faster. Audio is now added inline in the import review form, so it’s a single drop or paste instead of a three step dialog.
- Archive your content. You can now archive lessons and courses you’re finished with to keep your Library tidy, without deleting anything.
- Choose your subtitle language when importing. The browser extension now lets you pick which subtitle language to import from YouTube, Netflix and other streaming sites.
- Better transcription for imported audio and video. We’ve moved most languages onto a new transcription model and improved the way long audio is split up before transcription, which should mean cleaner sentence breaks in your imports.
- New Levantine Arabic voices. We’ve added two new Levantine Arabic voices, Laloosh and Faris.
- Lynx improvements. Lynx is now running on a newer model, uses what you told us during onboarding to give more relevant advice, and its chat interface has been updated. The lesson complete comment now shows the translation by default and lets you reply straight from a chat input box. There’s also a new setting under Lynx letting you control whether Lynx remembers details about you.
- Streaming Lynx coach response. Lynx’s comment on the lesson complete page now streams in progressively instead of appearing all at once.
- Advanced levels beyond Advanced 2 show up properly, fixing a bug that showed Beginner 1 instead.
- Japanese furigana fixes. Fixes to furigana display, which was sometimes not showing correctly and appearing where it shouldn’t.
Additional fixes
- Sentence review was broken for Chinese, Cantonese and Japanese.
- Imported Chinese lessons were showing Japanese hiragana readings instead of pinyin.
- The Vietnamese parser was splitting words incorrectly on import.
- Drag and drop import was not working on iPad.
- Full stops were disappearing after bold text.
- Text to speech was reading out markup on certain words.
- Untranslated and mistranslated strings across the interface.
- Speaking practice was failing with a microphone error.
- Punctuation placement in sentence translations for right-to-left languages.
- A missing premium check in sentence review.
- Several import and lesson loading errors.
- Emailed vocabulary exports were not arriving when filtered.
- The streak repair popup now has clearer wording.
- Book challenge completion percentage now recalculates after swapping the ebook.
- The daily streak reset was showing 9pm instead of your local midnight.
iOS
- We did not put out an App Store release in August. The next iOS update is in testing now. As mentioned last month, the larger iOS rework is still on track for a beta later this quarter, and we’ll reach out to those of you who asked to join the beta group.
Android
- Tap words in video scroll mode without pausing. There’s a new option in your settings so that tapping a word while a video is playing no longer stops playback. It’s off by default, so turn it on if you’d like to try it.
- Lynx is now open to free users. The popup that blocked free accounts from Lynx chat is gone. You can now use Lynx within your token limit.
- Lynx on the lesson complete screen. Lynx’s comment now appears for everyone on Android, matching web. You can tap words in it to see meanings and create LingQs, translations are shown by default, and you can reply directly in the chat box.
- Rate Lynx responses. You can now give a thumbs up or thumbs down on Lynx replies, which helps us work out what’s actually useful.
- Lynx memory and data settings. There are now settings controlling whether Lynx remembers details about you and whether your chats are used to improve the product.
- Better video playback. Lessons split from a long YouTube video now play the matching segment of the video, your chosen playback speed is kept when you come back to the app, and switching between video and full size video keeps the video playing or paused as it was.
- Repeat word audio with a tap. Tapping the same word again replays its audio, without having to close and reopen the widget.
- Faster course lessons. Opening a lesson from a course page is now as quick as opening it from Continue Studying.
As always we look forward to your feedback!
