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Eggbun Education, a Breath of Fresh Air in Foreign Language Education with an AI Chatbot Tutor App

The most important thing when learning a foreign language is repetitive studying. Even if you have one-on-one classes with an excellent teacher, you will not improve without repeating what you learned. But with a chatbot, you can study foreign languages without any time or spatial constraints. One company has been succeeding with a language learning application that uses chatbot technologies. The company is Eggbun Education.

‘Eggbun’ is a product specializing in review and practicing. It is a language education chatbot that helps students ‘internalize’ what they have learned. Eggbun has an unparalleled position among language learning applications that use chatbot technologies. In just one year after its launch, it had 2,500 paying subscribers, which amounts to KRW 250 million per year in revenues. It currently offers Asian languages such as Korean, Japanese and Chinese language learning software to North America and Southeast Asia. In November of this year, an English learning program was launched for Koreans. For a price of just KRW 6,900 per month, users can practice and review what they have learned as much as they want. The basic English education market in Korea is reported to be worth around KRW 15 trillion, so it is something that the chatbot industry cannot miss out on. There are high expectations for Eggbun in the English education market in Korea, as it utilizes a unique tool called chatbot language learning.

Over 1 million users around the world in just 2 years after launch

Eggbun Education CEO Moon Gwan-gyun had been interested in learning foreign languages ever since he was a child. Thinking about his experience learning from a tutor, he developed a tutorbot that analyzes the answers of students to questions given by the bot to give appropriate feedback and to allow continued repetitive practices. This company, which was founded with two co-CEOs in April 2016, has grown into a company with nine employees now. According to the company, there are 1 million people who downloaded the Eggbun application around the world, while 100,000 are active users. This is quite a significant number for a startup that was only founded two years ago. Eggbun Education received investments totaling KRW 900 million in March of 2017 from Swedish and English Angel investors such as Strong Ventures and Primer. It was agreed to supply Eggbun to 100 companies including Cheil Worldwide and Samsung Heavy Industries, and in July 2018, celebrities such as Sam Hwang and Eric Nam also made investments.

There was more good news that followed. Samsung Electronics also saw Eggbun as having high growth potential. In October of this year, Eggbun Education was selected for innovative startup support by Samsung Electronics. It made the list of 15 businesses that were finally selected from the 331 that applied. Eggbun Education will use the incubator space at the Samsung Electronics Seoul R&D Campus located in Umyeon-dong, Seoul from December 2018 for one year free of charge, and employees can use the conference room and cafeteria on the campus as well. It will also receive up to KRW 100 million in development funding, mentoring from in-company and outside experts for actual startups including works related to design, technology, patents and taxes, and also have opportunities to participate in overseas IT exhibits such as CES and MWC.

Improving foreign language skills with a chatbot that is even better than a tutor

The strengths of a chatbot can be summarized as follows. A chatbot reacts immediately, and communicates whenever the user wants. As well, a personalized dialogue is possible, and it is easy to use as it employs a simple and easy method of conversation. Among the chatbot businesses, education is a field that has particularly high growth potential. This is because a chatbot has several advantages over people in the field of education. First, a chatbot does not judge people. It does not belittle the person when the user gives a wrong answer. It also gives the same consistent answer, no matter how many times it is asked. Repetition is essential for learning a foreign language, and from this perspective, a chatbot certainly has an edge over humans. Language education requires repeated checks and continuous solving of simple problems, and as such, there is high potential for chatbots to dominate in language education.

Another advantage is its flexibility of being usable anywhere

So, what is the difference between other foreign language education apps and the chatbot language education app provided by Eggbun Education? Eggbun analyzes the user level and responses of users for questions made by the chatbot to offer an optimized environment for practicing and review. The chatbot looks at the sentence given by the user to check three areas and give feedback. It checks the pattern to determine whether the learned pattern was used, checks the spelling, and checks the grammar to see whether it was entered according to the registered rule. It is basically a one-on-one foreign language tutor. Many people learning a foreign language complain that the biggest difficulty is that no matter how many lectures they listen to, it is hard to connect what they learned with their everyday life due to the difficulty of practice and review. Eggbun can be used to practice and review what was learned in order to internalize it, thus maximizing learning efficiency. As well, the nature of a chatbot means it can be applied anywhere flexibly. As Eggbun CEO Moon put it, “The ultimate goal of Eggbun is to become a foreign language education platform. Another advantage is that it can coexist rather than compete with other foreign language education companies, publishers, and video production businesses.” Eggbun Education is currently collaborating with Samsung C Lab, Multicampus, Haebeop Chunjae Education and Start English Now, among others.

Seo Mi-hee│Guest reporter│hee@khu.ac.kr