Sam Mendelson and Allan Zhang are having a great week.
After their iOS app, Wonder Keyboard, was named an Editor’s Choice among the best new titles in the App Store after its launch 10 days ago, they set out for Silicon Valley in search of funding.
Now, after several days in California, they’re in Austin, reveling in the electric hum of SXSW. They're also weighing their options, as users pour in and new doors open for the New York City duo, who operate professionally as
.
“There’s been no horrific trauma [to the service’s backend], at least not yet,” said Mendelson. “The growth has been huge, surpassing our dreams for the first three to six months.”
The app is a keyboard extension that analyzes text as you type, weighing context before recommending alternate wordings in the vernacular of four personas: An aristocrat, an all-American athlete, a Texan and a 1980s Valley girl.
A focus on education
Some of those personas are just for fun, but the aristocrat is actually designed to teach new words to users, expanding the vocabulary of native English speakers and learners alike. So will the CEO persona, due out next month.
“I’ve been tutoring since I could read,” Mendeslon said. “I was in that awkward position in class where I bugged the teacher so much that she sat me down with a book and another kid. I was that way through high school and college at Cornell.”
Zhang came to language education from the other side. He immigrated to the U.S. from China at the age of 10 and struggled to pick up advanced English vocabulary throughout high school. He studied music and finance in college, which led to the job at JP Morgan Chase where he met his cofounder.
Zhang learned to build apps on Codecademy, the virtual development bootcamp based in Midtown. He and Mendelson now use Python for Wonder Keyboard’s language processing and Objective C for its front end behavior.
UX feedback
Wonder Keyboard began as a messaging service called Words U that launched a year ago. The messenger applied the same intelligence to users’ typing to help them sound smarter and learn new words.
Words U quickly gained 3,000 simultaneously connected users and became popular among English learners abroad, especially Russia.
But Words U had a limitation: The intelligent vocabulary engine only worked inside the messenger, requiring both people in a conversation to use it in order for either to benefit. It wasn’t portable to the other contexts where it would be useful, like email or social media.
“Our error was we spent a lot of time arguing with users [who wanted more flexibility],” Mendelson said. “We were pointing out other features and promoting the messaging service, when what they really wanted was a keyboard they could use anywhere.”
Fortunately, Apple had made that possible with their June 2014 announcement of custom keyboards in iOS 8. Mendelson and Zhang decided to leverage the new functionality and redesign Words U as a keyboard that would work anywhere in iOS.
That endeavor earned them a place in Intel’s education accelerator and a $100,000 seed investment. Zhang and Mendelson left their jobs at JP Morgan Chase at the end of July and flew to California in October for several months of mentoring and workshops.
New personas
Now the pair has their work cut out for them. In addition to rolling out a new persona in Wonder Keyboard every month, such as the upcoming CEO persona and a pirate for Talk Like a Pirate Day in September, Zhang and Mendelson hope to streamline the process so users can someday create their own personas based on a few phrases of their own design.
That means not only scaling up the app’s language processing component, but adding the complexity of incorrectness in personas like the Texan and Valley Girl.
“That’s a whole other layer of challenge,” Mendelson said, explaining that current limitations on iPhone memory allocation to the keyboard already require Wonder Keyboard to break its cognitive processing into two steps. “But we also think it brings a lot of fun for the user. And we also get a kick out of it, which I guess just makes us weird.”
Which is partly what they’re looking for in their travels.
“Our mentors are thrilled and hope we can sustain that unbelievably ridiculous hockey stick that the [App Store feature] provides,” Mendelson said. “I think it’ll be challenging to continue at such a high pace right now, so we’re aggressively looking to fundraise and hire a bit to keep this momentum going.”
“It’d be great to have another engineer on board,” Zhang said. “We have pretty ambitious plans in terms of refining this algorithm, as well as updating the app. That would be fantastic.”
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