blas. Monthly Roundup: September 2026

We skipped the August edition, so this month's edition will be slightly longer and will cover both months.

The rundown:

• Friends - a new way to play and compete with friends and family in the app
• Blas dictation - speak instead of type, on your iPhone and Mac, with Android coming in October
• Fluency rating - a clearer picture of how your language is really progressing
• Coming in October - Blas writing for all six languages, and speaking lessons for Welsh and Scots Gaelic

Friends

We know that learning a language can be a bit of a grind, especially when you're doing it by yourself. So we've added friends, to make the games and puzzles part of the app a bit more interactive and give you a bit more motivation to keep up your work.

You pick a handle and get a little character to go with it. Your handle is how friends find you, and other people never see your email. Search for someone or send them an invite, and your feed shows what your friends have done that day. You can heart a post to say well done.

Every week there are leaderboards for Focal and for Puzzles. You can look at just your friends or at everyone, and see how far up the table you are. Finish near the top and you earn a medal you can wear on your profile.

A friend's profile shows their streak and how their week compares to yours, and if they haven't played today, you can nudge them. This feature will become a lot more important and expansive once we have a few more games in the app.

Please add each other and let me know how you find it!

Blas dictation

Last month I said dictation was coming, and it is now out on both your iPhone and your Mac. It is coming to Android in October too.

Here is the same sentence, written twice. Typing it with all the fadas took 11.4 seconds on the left. Saying it to the blas keyboard took 2.1 seconds on the right.

On iPhone, you add the blas keyboard, tap START and speak. It types what you say, in English or in Irish, in any app.

On Mac, press Command-D anywhere and speak, and it keeps a history of what you said. You can download it at blasapp.com/mac.

Both use the Irish speech recogniser we built ourselves. My blog post, Blas-IE: the #1 open Irish speech-to-text model, goes into how accurate it is. I made all this mostly for myself, because I dictate for work all the time, so if you use it, tell me what is missing.

Fluency rating

Until now blas showed you what you had done, but not really where you stand. Every language you learn now has a fluency rating, from 0 to 3,000, that sits on the same A1 to C2 scale you may know from language exams. It starts at zero, goes up as you get harder things right, and slowly drops if you stop and forget. After every session it tells you what moved it.

Most language apps work out a rating like this for every user, but it stays hidden inside their systems. I think it is far more interesting and useful to see it yourself, so you get a real gauge of where you are instead of it being tucked away behind the app.

Blas writing (coming in October)

This is a spell checker, grammar checker and punctuation checker for all six blas languages: Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Manx, Cornish and Breton. It underlines a mistake as you type, suggests the fix, and explains the rule if you want to know why. Unlike Grammarly, it doesn't recommend what to write or how to rephrase things, it just checks that what you have written is correct. It is waiting on Safari, so it will be out next month.

Welsh and Scots Gaelic speaking lessons (coming in October)

Welsh and Scots Gaelic are getting the new speaking lessons too. Each one is a real-life scenario, like meeting a new neighbour: you learn the key lines, then have the conversation yourself by replying with voice messages.

Thanks for reading. My Instagram is @blas.app and my email is info@blasapp.com. I read every DM, so send anything my way.

- from john at blas.