blas. Monthly Roundup: July 2026

I feel like a monthly email is the best way to show and discuss new features and changes, with a lot of stuff releasing soon.

The rundown:

• Irish speaking - reinvented speaking lessons on the Irish course
• 1% for the Planet - how we are helping environmental charities
• Dictation and writing - coming soon

Irish speaking

The old speaking lessons sucked. They were on the Irish and Welsh courses and functioned as a back and forward, as if you were in a text exchange, with everything being read aloud. These were:

a) prone to a lot of mistakes: we used Apple's and Microsoft's speech recognisers to pick up what the user was saying and then had that transcribed into text, but they picked up vowels badly

b) doing the lessons felt very repetitive and uninspiring

So these have been reimagined as a series of voice messages, centred around a scenario you might find yourself in. These use our own Irish automatic speech recogniser (ASR) that we developed.

An example of this might be an interaction at the shop or the gym. This was done to try to keep speaking exercises as practical and useful as possible.

Right now this is just for Irish. I am going to make the old Welsh speaking lessons free for now, as I am not fully happy with them. If these are well used, then I think it would be worthwhile to add them for the other languages.

1% for the Planet

blas is now a member of 1% for the Planet! 1% is an organisation that works with businesses to help facilitate donations to environmental charities by giving a portion of your earnings every year, regardless of profit; so one percent of the app's revenue will go towards charities concerned with helping the planet and environment, from things focused on recycling to helping the oceans.

I have yet to choose exactly which charities we will be supporting for 2026, but when I do I will update the website and the Instagram.

Blas dictation

This is an idea we made with our Irish ASR that turned into a product we want people to use practically. The same way you might dictate into your mic on your phone or laptop instead of typing, this works for both English and Irish. Our blog on this, Blas-IE: the #1 open Irish speech-to-text model, goes into a bit more detail and shows how accurate it is.

This was made mostly because I use dictation for work very frequently, and so I wanted to build something for myself.

This was in the blog last month, but unfortunately I just didn't have the time to release it in June. It will be coming in the first week of August instead.

I will have a few video demos of how all of this works uploaded to Instagram over the next few days. Again, if this is well used and liked I want to do the same for the other languages.

Blas writing

This is another idea that I just couldn't quite get out in time. This is essentially Grammarly, but for the six Celtic languages blas does (plus English).

This works on two levels:

Level one - this works as a spellcheck. So any words that are not correct get flagged. The same with things like fadas or basic punctuation, like an apostrophe in a person's name. It can also do the same for language-specific rules for mutation.

Level two - this works as a deterministic model that tries to interpret the context of a sentence and suggest things like commas or grammar changes.

This works the same as Grammarly but doesn't pop up quite as much, because our version is slightly less advanced (Grammarly is an entire company and I am just me). So when the extension is unsure it will just not recommend anything.

I am pretty confident I can get this out in August.

More next month.

- from john at blas.