Uolo English Speaking App: Building an AI Learning Companion for Tier 2 and 3 India

Amit joined Uolo as Head of Product at a point when the company was building learning products for schools. The problem he focused on was specific: children in smaller Indian cities had no way to practice spoken English.

Most Indian students could read and write English adequately, but speaking required a practice partner, and the home environment in smaller cities rarely provided one. The gap was not in curriculum or content. It was in the absence of a safe, accessible space to practice speaking.

The product was an AI-assisted speaking companion that gave children a conversational partner on their phone. The bet was that if kids found it engaging, they would come back on their own, and return frequency would be the proof of whether it was working.

The harder problem was distribution and trust. Parents in these markets were skeptical of mobile as a learning tool, associating it with games and entertainment. Amit and the team built the go-to-market around school partnerships, using the school as the trust anchor. When a school endorsed the product, parents were far more willing to let their children use it.

The product scaled through this channel, with kids returning consistently, which Amit treated as the primary signal of product-market fit.