Adam Carson uses AI to reinvent English pronunciation training

Czech entrepreneur Adam Carson is convinced that traditional methods of learning English pronunciation work “backwards” — instead of training muscle memory, people are handed piles of text and told to guess how it should sound. He built his approach into the brand Say Wuster, and after a failed attempt to launch it as a startup a few years ago, he is now returning to the idea — this time with the help of artificial intelligence.

For many years Carson has been coaching communication, presentation and negotiation skills. His clients include founders of Czech startups, company directors, diplomats and lawyers who run into language barriers in international business. “Most often clients tell me they don't feel confident in negotiations. In Czech or Slovak everything goes great for them, but in English they lack confidence and authority,” he explains.

His method is fundamentally different from language schools and apps: instead of analyzing text, it works with the physical position of the speech muscles. “Sound is a consequence of shape. You form your lips in a certain way, exhale and calibrate. Then you drill it over and over until muscle memory forms,” Carson says.

Carson had to work out his methods himself. After graduating from Charles University, he spent six years living in Taiwan, where he advertised English pronunciation lessons through Facebook. Local clients wanted to work exclusively with native speakers and didn't believe a Czech from Prague could teach them the right accent. “So I changed my name to Carson — it sounds Anglo-Saxon and opened doors for me,” he admits. After that, the first clients started responding to his ads.

Demand in Asia came mainly from people in the tech and business sectors: Taiwan is home to the headquarters of giants like Asus, Acer and TSMC, which work closely with the US, and flawless English there serves as a mark of quality, education and experience.

At first, teaching language was a side career for Carson — after university he worked at the European Union's representation office, where he used Chinese, French and English every day. Working in a diplomatic environment led him, among other things, to extreme forms of negotiation — he completed a week of crisis-situation training together with the Czech army in Vyškov.

When his courses in Taiwan started gaining momentum, Carson wanted to set up his own company there, but discovered that as a foreigner he would have to run the business through a local frontman — a setup that often ends with stolen know-how. Partly for personal reasons, he decided to return to Czechia and build his business there instead. More than 1,300 professionals have now been through his courses.

To keep the business from depending entirely on him as a mentor, Carson decided to digitize his method for teaching correct pronunciation and build his own app called Say Wuster. The project went through CzechCrunch's Startup Academy program, where it beat around fifteen competitors to win. Together with a mentor, the team built a first technical prototype for training language muscle memory, but the project then ran into a lack of funds for further development. Now, armed with the capabilities of artificial intelligence, Carson intends to see the idea through to the end — though he stresses: “I don't want you to depend on the app. I want to lift you up and teach you to correct your own mistakes yourself. Then you won't need me anymore.”