blas. Monthly Roundup: June 2026
What we shipped in June: the Contribute studio, our Irish dictation model, the blas archive, and new practice modes.
We have recently added a bunch of new things, as well as taking on a few projects related to language conservation, so we thought it would be good to share.
The rundown:
- Contribute - record your voice to help replace the computer voices in the app
- Irish dictation - a speech model we built to improve the tech and rework the speaking lessons
- Blas archive - a drifting moodboard of Celtic places, manuscripts, and artefacts
- New modes - 60-Second Vocab and Conjugations
Cornish and Manx also joined the app at the beginning of June.
We also recently passed 20,000 installs. Thanks to everyone supporting the app this early, even through the bugs and the mess-ups. Here is to another 20k.
Contribute
The new Contribute studio lets you record audio and submit fixes. Once another speaker reviews them, they go straight into the app for everyone.
- Record clips for words and sentences you know
- Flag or fix content that looks off
- Your accepted recordings become the audio other learners hear
It works by constantly showing your recordings to other users, so by the time a clip makes it into the app it has been peer-reviewed many times.
We want this to be an open resource for each language, so you can use it whether you are a tutor, building your own language app, or anything else you find it useful for. There is no point hiding it inside the app.
Irish dictation
This is an Irish Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model. Right now our speaking and pronunciation lessons lean on Apple and Microsoft voices, which are prone to mistakes on Irish, and the same on Welsh. This improves on that massively.
You can read how we built it in Blas-IE: the #1 open Irish speech-to-text model, and try it on the dictation page.
This lets us bring out genuinely good speaking lessons, and if they land well we can do the same across the other courses. In-app dictation is rolling out soon.
Right now this is the best Irish speech model in the world, and we are making it free to use for other language resources. Just get in touch.
The blas archive
The archive is a starter version of an art project: a drifting moodboard of Celtic places, manuscripts, and artefacts, plotted on a global map. Tap any image to read its listing.
It currently holds 2,000+ pieces, and we want to keep expanding it. Small projects like this can help conservation efforts for language and culture when they are done well.
New modes
We also added two new practice modes:
- 60-Second Vocab - one minute on the clock to clear as many words as you can, then a leaderboard to see where you land against your coursemates.
- Conjugations - pick the right form for a verb, tense, and person. There was a lot of demand for this.
More next month.