Two new languages and romanization for specific languages.

New Languages

• Added Hindi
• Added Hebrew

Romanizations

• Pinyin added in Chinese newsletters
• Romaji (Hepburn) added in Japanese newsletters
• IAST added in Hindi newsletters

What's next?

• Continuing to grow Noo Speak
• Working on Noo Speak Mobile

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

We're fixing inaccurate translations by bypassing AI translations altogether and creating summaries using key phrases from international articles written by native speakers. We're also lowering the level requirement for unlimited articles and custom topics.

International Sourcing

• Articles are now sourced internationally instead of just U.S.-focused news. This allows for more language-specific idioms and expressions to appear in newsletters, along with country-specific contexts
• Reduced the chances of duplicate articles appearing in the newsletter

Translation Overhaul

• Content is now sourced directly from key phrases within articles, which are then translated into English using more reliable, well-developed English translation methods. This avoids the use of AI for summarization, translation, and simplification, which previously led to translation errors
• Replaced the Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced newsletter level settings with a system based on article length, offering Standard and Extended options. This change was made as part of the move away from using AI in creating newsletters
• Once unlocked, custom topics can be added for any subject in any offered language
• Improved quiz generation to hopefully reduce error rates

Bugfixes & Improvements

• Lowered the level requirement for unlimited subscriptions from Level 25 to Level 15
• Lowered the level requirement for custom topics and Noo Speak Amplify status from Level 50 to Level 30
• Removed preference settings for news filtering due to very low usage combined with high overhead costs
• Removed the Amplify ad and purchase option on the Level Up page. Leveling up to Level 30 is now the only way to gain Noo Speak Amplify status and access custom topics
• Added a CAPTCHA to the feedback form
• Updated the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy to reflect the removal of the Stripe integration

What's next?

• Continuing to grow Noo Speak
• Working on Noo Speak Mobile

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

Quick update to fix some styling and content issues reported by users. A leaderboard was also added to rank your progress and make Noo Speak feel less lonely.

Leaderboard

Bugfixes & Improvements

• Listed supported languages on the Noo Speak landing page
• Changed the colour of Level Up tasks to make them stand out against the level milestones container
• Set the Noo Speak Amplify ad to appear at level 8 instead of at level 3

What's next?

• Continuing to grow Noo Speak
• Working on Noo Speak Mobile

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

We're making it possible to access all paid Noo Speak Amplify features for free through an account level system. Earn rewards for every level milestone reached, with free Amplify for life as the final reward!

Level Up System

• Locking useful features like multiple subscriptions behind the paywall of Noo Speak Amplify wasn't helpful to anyone. This new levelling system gives you a way to get all Amplify features for free
• Levels are gained through a mix of gaining XP, referring others to Noo Speak, completing missions, and more
• You can view your level progression, missions, and rewards on the Amplify/Level Up page

Bugfixes & Improvements

• Replaced the XP badge on the Dashboard with a level badge
• Made visual clarity updates to the Dashboard
• Updated the Privacy Policy to reflect the use of data collected from the voluntary user survey

What's next?

• Continuing to grow Noo Speak

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

Introducing Noo Speak Amplify, a way to get local-language news articles with our first Amplify-exclusive topic, and a brand new look for Noo Speak!

Local-Language News

Amplify

• Unlock all Noo Speak features with Amplify (formerly Premium)
• Includes unlimited basic subscriptions, 1 custom subscription, Amplify-exclusive topics, and up to 3 custom topics per subscription
• Add more custom subscriptions for $1.50 USD/month
• Payments, billing, and subscription management handled through Stripe for data privacy
• Try Amplify free for 7 days, then just $2.99 USD/month!

Bugfixes & Improvements

• Complete overhaul of our front page. See it live!
• Now explicitly checking every article summary for ads before using it
• Visually distinguish custom emails on your Dashboard
• The feedback form is now a contact us form
• Made the 0XP banner only show up if there is a stored newsletter
• Updated the Noo Speak logo text
• Updated Terms & Conditions to reflect Stripe integration

What's next?

• Getting the word out about Noo Speak and tracking our launch!

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

Badges to showcase your progress, a page to manage your future premium subscription, and a bunch of bug fixes across the board.

My Premium

Badges

Bugfixes & Improvements

• New 'favourite' icon for saving newsletters
• Fixed inconsistent language around custom subscriptions/newsletters
• Fixed bug with custom topics not showing up in subscriptions
• Fixed social media icon size in Outlook
• Improved article summaries

What's next?

• Wrapping up the initial premium features and launching Noo Speak Premium!

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

Custom topics are now available! Create a newsletter with your favourite topics and start learning in your interests.

Until Noo Speak Premium is released, custom topics can only be accessed if you're a Beta Tester. Sign up here!

What's next?

• Developing features for our Beta Test
• Continuing development of the Noo Speak mobile app
• Continuing the redesign of our website homepage

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

We're looking for Beta Testers to help us with the current and future features of Noo Speak, with a focus on the features that will be included in Noo Speak Premium. Beta testers will provide feedback, contribute to discussions, and gain free access to premium features. Sign up today!

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

You can now sign up for Noo Speak using your Google account! This update also includes several much-needed visual updates and a limit on the number of subscriptions per user.

Google Account Integration

• If you already have a Noo Speak account, you can now also access it by logging in with your Google account of the same email address.

Bugfixes & Improvements

• Limited newsletter subscriptions to one per user. The option to have multiple subscriptions will be a feature offered through Noo Speak Premium in the future
• Added a placeholder page for Noo Speak Premium
• Visual updates for the home page
• Visual updates for authentication pages
• Removed the requirement for selecting your country when signing up
• Improved the scrolling animation on the home page
• Removed our Twitter account due to lack of use

What's next?

• Rolling out our Noo Speak Beta Testers program, stay tuned for an announcement!
• Continuing development of the Noo Speak mobile app
• Continuing the redesign of our website homepage to improve clarity and user experience

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

Noo Speak now supports Arabic! We've also added the option to change your subscription topics in the Dashboard.

New language: Arabic

Subscription Topics

Bugfixes & Improvements

• Fixed an issue with Password Reset links being invalid

What's next?

• Continuing development of the Noo Speak mobile app
• Continuing the redesign of our website homepage to improve clarity and user experience

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

This update introduces the top 2 most requested features: the ability to show/hide English translations in-newsletter and a filtering option for articles based on specific topics (e.g. war and conflict).

Content Filters

English Dropdowns

Bugfixes & Improvements

• Added quick access to latest quizzes at the top of the Dashboard
• Removed the single article link and added multiple article sources for better coverage and reputability
• Removed block formatting option for newsletters
• Removed disable English option for newsletters
• Removed article number option for newsletters

What's next?

• Development of the Noo Speak mobile app
• Redesigning our website homepage to improve clarity and user experience

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

This update brings active language learning to Noo Speak! You can now generate quizzes from the content of your newsletter to help you practice what you're reading. We also did a visual update of the dashboard for better clarity.

Quizzes

• Added a link to the newsletter quiz at the bottom of each newsletter email
• See the status of your quizzes on your Dashboard

• You can see your total XP in your Dashboard

Dashboard Visual Update

Bugfixes & Improvements

• Fixed broken formatting for newsletter table at some screen dimensions
• Smoother dynamic scaling on the Dashboard
• Reduced the chance of generating incorrect news summaries
• Fixed a bug with Technology news articles not being sent in newsletter
• Added more article sources

What's next?

• XP is meant to provide a sense of progression and can also add a competitive aspect. For those who want such competition, you'll be able to join the leaderboard to see how you rank against other Noo Speak users!
• Adding content filters so you can choose to not hear about certain topics in your news
• Monitoring and fixing any issues that come up with the new quiz feature

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

A minor update improving how articles are summarized, quality-of-life bugfixes, and the addition of a Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Bugfixes

• Prevented banners from appearing in newsletters when viewed in webview
• Addressed a visual bug in Google Chrome related to the scrollbar on the Account Dashboard
• noospeak.com URLs now redirect properly if entered without a trailing slash
• Proper redirection to custom error pages in special cases

Changelog

• Article summarization has been improved to provide more cohesive and detailed sentences
• Updated account creation text in the Get Started modal
• Added a Privacy Policy and a Terms & Conditions
• Added a footer to the index page

What's next?

• We're reaching out to the community for our next update, let us know what you want to see!

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

Our biggest update yet! Focused on accessing Noo Speak Daily newsletters from within Noo Speak, this update lets you save your favourite sendouts and sets the foundation for future active language learning features.

Noo Speak Blog

• You're on it now! This is where future updates, announcements, and news about Noo Speak will be posted

Saving & Storing Newsletters

• Newsletters will automatically be stored on our servers for up to 7 days, after which they'll be deleted if they are not saved to your account
• You can now permanently save your newsletters to your account so you can access them online, at any time
• Saved and stored newsletters are displayed in your account dashboard
• Added a "View in Browser" link to Noo Speak Daily newsletters

Changelog

• Improved initial load times for the Noo Speak homepage
• Better navigation bar styling
• Made an Instagram account and added it to the social links
• Improved the look of the email sendouts
• New email banner for announcing new updates
• Added origin country field to account and newsletter signup
• Newsletter sign up form visual updates and better scaling for mobile view
• Homepage visual updates
• Slower newsletter scrolling animation on homepage
• Dashboard visual updates
• Created a lot of backend tests and a testing pipeline to improve development speed

What's next?

• Now that newsletters can be accessed from within Noo Speak, a lot of potential features in active language learning and progress tracking are possible. We'll be working with the Noo Speak community to receive feedback and generate new ideas for what we should tackle first!
• With the release of this update, we're also ready to start actively advertising Noo Speak

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

We're adding more value to having a noospeak.com account. In addition to managing subscriptions, newsletters can now be personalized through several formatting and content settings as well!

Newsletter Settings

• You can now choose to have at most 1, 2, or 3 articles per topic in your newsletter
• The language levels of subscribed newsletters can now be changed
• You can choose whether you want English translations to appear in your newsletter
• If English translations are enabled, you can choose to display them in a row format (immediately following the given sentence) or a block format (block of given language text followed by a block of English translations)

Bugfixes

• Advertisements from source news site no longer appear in the article summaries
• Optimized newsletter creation and delivery to better support large numbers of subscribers

What's next?

Our next update will focus on storing previous newsletters, being able to access them through the account dashboard, and being able to view the newsletter email in your browser.

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

Our first update is now live! In response to the valuable feedback received regarding personalizing the format and content of the newsletter, this update takes the initial step by implementing the creation of noospeak.com accounts.

Account creation & Dashboard

• Noo Speak accounts can now be created (click on Get Started on the home page)
• Active subscriptions can be viewed on the account dashboard
• Subscriptions can be added and removed from the account dashboard
• No customization options have been added as part of this update, we're planning to release these as part of our next update!

Bugfixes

• Added an optional email field to the feedback form to allow us to respond to you directly. If the email form is left blank, your submission will stay anonymous (even if you are logged into your account)
• Fixed a visual bug with repeated periods in article summary sentences
• Improved the rate of article return per topic
• Fixed a bug with article summaries containing irrelevant content
• Fixed an issue with the site icon sometimes not showing up

What's next?

Our next update will focus on adding customization options for newsletters. So far we're looking at the following:

• Newsletter structure (order of articles & translations)
• Option to not include English translations
• Adjust language level
• Change topics
• Adjust the number of articles per topic
• Let us know what other options you'd want!

We'll also be looking into how to show articles in your chosen language instead of English. This might go on to become a customization option for a future update!

Final note: The accounts system is a pretty major change to the website. We've done our best to test it, but if you run into any problems please let us know!

Thanks for reading :)

The Noo Speak Team

Noo Speak officially launched on January 15, 2024, and the response we have received from the community has really been inspiring! We sent out our first round of newsletters and have already seen hundreds of engagements on our reddit posts/product hunt/website.

Bugs

A few of the bugs reported so far and what we're doing about them

• "No news for this topic today"
  • Noo Speak does its best to provide relevant articles that are both recently published and from credible sources. Unfortunately, sometimes we end up with no articles left after all these steps are done.
  • We're doing our best to find the balance between providing quality articles and ensuring enough quantity as well.
• No confirmation email
  • We've been having some capacity issues with our email sending service the last couple days but it should be resolved now.
  • If you're not receiving a confirmation email after subscribing, check if it went to your spam folder (and mark as not spam to prevent this). If it's still not there, please let us know!
• Haven't received email
  • Some mail providers might mark the newsletter as spam due to the number of external links in it. Marking it as not spam will help the mail provider see the newsletter as reputable.
  • A small amount of the emails also bounced. If you didn't get your email and you also didn't get your confirmation email, please try signing up again.

Feedback

The general categories of feedback received so far

• Adding X Language
  • Our translation model has currently only been trained on the available 29 languages. Adding a new language can take a while, and if there's enough demand for one (future community poll) we'll do our best to include it!
• Articles in chosen language vs. English articles
  • Currently, the articles in the newsletter are all native English articles which have had their titles and summaries translated to the chosen language. They aren't articles that are actually written in that language. We intended that the translated text would just be used as a quick way to practice your language through sentences that interest you and that the original article would only be clicked on if someone was genuinely interested in reading about the article, not as an additional way to practice your language.
  • But with the feedback we've received, it seems like we could have misjudged this! It sounds like people might want the articles in the newsletter to be originally written in their chosen language as well. We'd love to hear your thoughts below but this seems like an important enough question to merit a future poll.

Future

What lies ahead

• Community engagement
  • This subreddit was created to facilitate discussions, polls, and feedback with the community. We're going to make sure that our future updates are guided by what you think and we'll do our best to respond to questions & feedback posted here!
• Account creation
  • A lot of people asked for more control over how the content in the newsletter is presented. Once we have a system for creating accounts on noospeak.com, you'll be able to change settings like email layout, inclusion of English translations, adjusting language level, adjusting topics, and more! Let us know what other settings you might want to see!
  • Once accounts are implemented, users will also be able to see all their past newsletter sendouts in their dashboard.

Thanks for using Noo Speak and welcome to the community :)

Alex