I am building PRAVIEL, an app that rests on one small heresy: the old languages are not dead, only unspoken, and unspoken is a curable condition.
- Founder & CEO of PRAVIEL, a lessons-first app that teaches ancient languages as living, speakable systems.
- Trained in artificial intelligence at the Institute of Science Tokyo. Before PRAVIEL: speech recognition on supercomputers, LLM agents, and a startup or two. These days the models report to the languages.
- I care about pronunciation, provenance, and shipping. Order depends on the day.
- My bio reads ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ, know thyself. Thales called it the hardest thing there is; the easiest, advising others (Diogenes Laertius 1.36).
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PRAVIEL: Ancient Languages. Duolingo proved that five minutes a day can carry a language; PRAVIEL points that habit at Latin, Ancient Greek, and nine other ancient tongues, and holds it to a scholar's standard. Short daily lessons in speaking, listening, and reading, with reconstructed pronunciation you can actually hear. Hold a conversation with a historical persona, or tap any word of a real text to take it apart. Built for beginners, checked by experts. Free to start, on web, iPhone, and Android.
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Under the hood: one Flutter and Dart codebase carries the app to iPhone, Android, and the web; the marketing site is Next.js on Node at praviel.com; the AI tutors keep their sources in order. The languages remain the hard part.
From the workshop. A few public pieces from the machine-learning years:
| Repository | What it is |
|---|---|
| pneumonia-detection-xray-resnet | A ResNet that reads chest X-rays for signs of pneumonia. |
| TS-VAD | Target-speaker voice activity detection: who is speaking, and exactly when. |
| LLM-Powered-Text-Enhancement-Suite | An LLM toolchain for rewriting, correcting, and sharpening prose. |
| customer-churn-prediction-streamlit | Predicting who is about to leave, while there is still time to ask them to stay. |
| codegen-llm | Experiments in teaching models to write code worth keeping. |
Every script baked to vector paths: the Arabic joins, the Sanskrit ligates, the Hebrew runs right to left. Egyptian hieroglyphs live in the app.
The first row's adjective is Pliny's: he files Archimedes under machinalis scientia (Natural History 7.125).
A new line each morning, by GitHub Action, from people considerably wiser than me. The small word in the lower margin is the catchword: tomorrow's first word, the way scribes kept their quires in order.
GitHub sees only my open half; the busiest repositories are private. Roman numerals make any figure look deliberate.
A serpent once grazed the offerings at Anchises' tomb, and Aeneas wondered if it was the spirit of the place (Aeneid 5.84-96). This one grazes on commits.
Two ideas sit in the drawer and receive the occasional weekend visit: a proper game for learning ancient languages, with a world in it rather than flashcards with confetti, and an app that finally teaches music theory the way theory deserves. PRAVIEL holds the floor until further notice. Good seeds keep.
