How Beepboop made gamified language classes 40% more effective with Daily

• Fast onboarding — One engineer (with zero WebRTC experience) built a working prototype in three weeks.
• Increased efficiency — “In a 30-minute class, we went overnight from 17 minutes worth of language learning to 24 minutes of instruction time by switching to Daily.” —Matt Douglass, CTO.
• Time savings — “Daily probably cuts our development time by 90%. So it's 10 times more efficient for us.”
• Increasing TAM — Moving from a web-first to device-agnostic model has helped Beepboop drastically increase their TAM. Being able to teach by computer or phone opens up their platform to “over a billion more people.”
• Fulfilling their mission — Daily helps achieve the Beepboop company mission to “Teach more than you know, and learn wherever you are.”
• Expanding access — “We had to cap our Zoom classes to 9 students to make them easier to manage, now we can have up to 200 students per class while providing differentiated learning experiences for each student.” — Devon Saliga, CEO.

The Beepboop team knew early on that they wanted to build an audio-only experience. “The product has been designed around the fact that most of the world doesn't have high speed internet to support the video quality that we would want,” Devon Saliga, CEO of Beepboop says.

Rather than a limitation, Saliga sees this as a blessing. Focusing on audio allows Beepboop to emphasize the strengths of their teaching method. “Because it's audio-only and slightly anonymous, students feel more comfortable being vulnerable and embrace feedback. It's encouraging and not demotivating.”

The Beepboop team were initially using Zoom, but the user experience was unresponsive and clunky, leading to a suboptimal experience which was hurting the business.

Students had a hard time muting and unmuting themselves fast enough to participate, often producing a lag. Similarly, instructors spent more time managing the classroom environment and configurations than actually teaching. “You have one student who doesn't understand what's going on and they start interrupting the class with questions,” Saliga says. “It breaks the whole flow for everyone.”

Their goal of making teachers the star was becoming impossible because of performance issues.

High-quality audio is key to delivering high-quality instruction. “We do things like correct minute mispronunciations. If you can't hear the people correctly, you're not going to be able to do that,” Saliga says.

Daily unlocks enormous potential, compared to video conferencing software. “Right now, if you want to learn Spanish on our platform, you also need to know English. And if you're on video, everyone is looking at the exact same content,” Douglass explains. “With Daily we can customize the content for who is looking at it. Everyone could be learning the same Spanish lesson, but the translations could be in Mandarin, German, or English. So that's just something that wasn't a possibility before.”

Since audio is less resource-intensive than video, the team have effectively moved from a web-first to device agnostic model. By making their platform accessible on mobile, they've expanded the number of people able to teach on the platform by more than a billion people. The Beepboop team looks forward to scaling their business and continuing to fulfill its mission, building with Daily.

Responsive user controls

Building on Daily's app-message function, Beepboop added intuitive controls to let instructors quickly mute and unmute students, along with other functions. Students love it. As one student noted, “I love this new WebDrill experience. It's so much easier.”

Smooth data syncing

Beepboop is able to automatically sync class lists with attendees, saving set up time at the beginning of class. This used to be a manual process, as Douglass explains: “Our web app that guided the instructor through the class and told them who to call on would have to be manually synced by the instructor. So that was really frustrating. Now it's something we don't have to worry about.”

Built on Party Line

Using Daily's audio app sample code as a starting point, the team had an effective prototype running in just three weeks.