How it started
My son's Chinese is good. Better than mine will ever be — which, honestly, isn't saying much. I don't speak Chinese at all.
The last couple of years, I've been deep in AI through my work — building products with it, and especially experimenting with voice. So I started messing around at home: using AI voice to help my son practise his spoken Chinese, because I certainly couldn't.
What surprised me was how well it worked. He was getting real feedback, real conversation, actually improving. And I didn't need to understand a word of Chinese myself to see it happening.
It started as a pet project for one kid. Then I started talking to other parents and realised it could help a lot more.
What I found
The more I talked to parents, the more I heard the same frustration. PSLE Chinese Oral exams are high-stakes and there's almost no way to practise it effectively at home. Tuition helps, but there's limited individual speaking time. Assessment books can't teach speaking. And while there are plenty of general AI language tools out there, nothing was built for the actual PSLE oral format — the reading aloud, the examiner conversation, the follow-up questions.
That felt like a gap worth closing.
What I built
PSLEPrep is an AI examiner that conducts realistic PSLE oral practice — the 朗读 reading component with pronunciation feedback, and the 会话 conversation with follow-up probes when answers are too short. Everything scored, everything explained in both Chinese and English so parents can actually understand what's going on.
It's not a replacement for your child's tutor. It's the practice they do between lessons — as many times as they want, whenever they want, with feedback every time.
Why I'm doing this
I'm not in this for the money. Once you factor in the AI costs running under the hood, I'm barely above water on every session. I keep building it because I genuinely think it helps — and because watching my own son improve made it hard to walk away from.
I believe AI can do real things for education. It can make practice cheaper, more available, more patient than any human tutor has time to be. But it's one piece of the puzzle, not the whole thing. Great teachers matter. So does talking to your parents and your grandparents at the dinner table. PSLEPrep is meant to live alongside those things — not replace them.