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Monthly Roundup: June 2026

Hello!

Welcome to the first monthly update for blas! We've recently added a bunch of cool stuff, as well as taking on a lot of projects related to language conservation, so I thought it would be cool to share.

The rundown:

  • Contribute - paying users to contribute their voice to the app to replace the computer voice
  • Irish dictation - a speaking model we have made to improve the tech and enable speaking lessons to be reworked
  • Blas archive
  • Some new modes

As well as Cornish and Manx coming to the app at the beginning of June!

I would also like to say that blas recently hit 20,000 installs. Thanks to all of you for supporting the app in such an early stage, even through a lot of the bugs or mess-ups; even if you just downloaded it to try and never again, it means a lot to me. Here's to another 20k!

Contribute

The new Contribute studio lets you record audio and submit fixes. Once another speaker reviews them, they go straight into the app for everyone.

  • Record clips for words and sentences you know
  • Flag or fix content that looks off
  • Your accepted recordings become the audio other learners hear
The Contribute studio

This works by constantly showing your recordings to other users, so by the time it makes it into the app a piece has been peer-reviewed a bunch of times.

I want this to be an open resource for each language, so you can use this if you are a tutor or trying to make your own language app or whatever it is that you may find it useful for. There's no point in hiding it within the app.

Irish dictation

This is an Irish Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model. Right now, we have some speaking and pronunciation lessons that aren't very good. If you have used either a lot, you know that when speaking Irish, it sometimes messes up what you're saying; we use Apple and Microsoft Voice right now, which is prone to mistakes, the same with Welsh. This improves on that massively.

You can read about how we built it in this write-up, and poke about with it here.

Irish dictation in the app

This means I can bring out actual good speaking lessons, and if they're well-liked, I can do the same with the other courses.

The Speak tab in blas.

(Unreleased as of yet)

I'm pretty proud of this work. Right now this is the best Irish-speaking model in the world, and I am making it free to use for other language resources if they wish (just shoot me an email).

Trinity College Dublin has been funded with €2 million by the Irish government to build the same, but theirs is not open to use by people, and it's ungodly expensive (€2 million!!!), and ours rates higher.

Blas archive

If you are following along on Instagram you will have seen this. This is a starter version of an art project, putting together a bunch of online art sources for Celtic art, and plotting them on a global map.

The blas archive The archive globe

Right now this includes 2000+ pieces, but I want to add more and expand what this does. I think making small projects like this can help conservation efforts for language and culture if done well.

Other modes

And finally we added:

  • 60-Second Vocab: one minute on the clock to get as many words right as you can, and then afterwards there is a leaderboard to see where you are vs your coursemates.
  • Conjugations: pick the right form for a verb, tense, and person. There was a bunch of demand for this.

Thanks for getting to the end. My Instagram and email are in the footer. I read every DM, so if there's an issue you have or a feature you think would be cool or even just a question, please send it my way!

John & the blas team