Guy Rymberg.
All work
01Live

Al Moalem

An LLM-powered voice and chat tutor for spoken Arabic, live with paying subscribers.

Role
Solo AI engineer: LLM & voice architecture, full stack, launch and support
Year
2026
100+
sign-ups in the first weeks
850+
real tutoring messages
3
days to first paying subscriber

As of late September 2026.

The problem

Hebrew speakers who want to speak Levantine Arabic have few ways to practice conversation, and most apps teach formal Arabic in a script beginners can't read yet.

What I built

  • A chat tutor that answers every Arabic word with Hebrew transliteration and translation, so beginners can read before they know the alphabet.
  • Voice-to-voice practice: Deepgram Nova-3 speech-to-text in, ElevenLabs text-to-speech out, streamed sentence by sentence with an audio cache to keep latency and cost down.
  • Conversation memory seeded from onboarding answers, so the tutor adapts to each learner's level and goals.
  • Model evaluation across Gemini, OpenAI and Claude before choosing the tutor model, plus per-message cost tracking.
  • Stripe subscriptions with webhooks, a free-tier paywall, a 5-email onboarding sequence with signed unsubscribe links, and an installable PWA.

From production

The login links that died before anyone clicked

Confirmation emails worked in every test, but a user reported dead links. Mail apps pre-fetch links to scan them, which used up the single-use token before the person tapped it. I moved verification behind an explicit button click, and added a test mode that routes all outgoing email to one inbox.

One user report, 56% of messages

A learner flagged a wrong transliteration. Instead of patching that one word, I measured it across the message log: the same pattern affected 56% of tutor replies. I fixed the root cause, verified it against the real data, then shipped.

Outcome

Launched with a small ad campaign and LinkedIn posts. Real learners use it every day, and paying subscribers have been signing up since launch week. I handle support and ship fixes from real user reports.

Stack

  • Next.js
  • React
  • Tailwind
  • Supabase
  • Postgres
  • Gemini API
  • OpenAI API
  • Deepgram
  • ElevenLabs
  • Stripe
  • Resend
  • Vercel Cron
  • PWA

Screens

Al Moalem chat: Arabic answer with Hebrew transliteration
Al Moalem chat: Arabic answer with Hebrew transliteration
Al Moalem onboarding screen
Al Moalem onboarding screen
Al Moalem learning hub
Al Moalem learning hub