Conheci a SEDE DO CAMBLY NOS EUA | Novidades em aulas de conversação em inglês!

hello and welcome to English in Brazil you have no idea where I'm going well you probably do because you read the title of this video but I'm going to visit a very important place in English as well secret star in your heart but you don't want to now [Music] engineer manager yeah engineer manager hi Karina like yeah do you know me of course I know you we're friendly we're nice regular Brazilian student for [Music] once in a blue [Laughter] moon teachers [Music] [Music] all the limit the sky is the limit so you won't believe who

this guy next to me is he founded Camp he's the founder of camp and Samir thank you very much for being here with us it's actually an honor for me to be like sitting next to you because I've been a heavy user for seven or eight years so it's just amazing to be here at your office and talking to you thank you so much for coming here I was very excited to meet you cuz I know we've been working with you for I think six or seven years now and so uh we're thrill to have

you here thank you so much so Samir I have some questions for you and the first one is why did you found cam where did you get this idea from yes I've been really excited about education for basically my my whole life I loved being a student I loved learning new things and then and then I got into technology I became a software engineer and I became really fascinated by the ways that technology can improve education really inspired by some other companies and what they've done to like make high quality education much more accessible to

everyone around the world world when I thought about what kind of impact I wanted to have personally and what I'm most passionate about I think the main thing that really came to mind for me was I want to work on education I want to help people learn new things it's just such a rewarding important thing to do in the world um very passionate about education and the ways technology can improve it and then separate from that I I've always been interested in learning languages I haven't been very good at it uh in fact I would

say that uh you know I took Spanish in high school it was actually probably my worst subject in high school like I just I didn't really get the hang of it very easily I sort of felt like I wasn't really a languages person separately from that I love to travel I love to go all over the world I've been to a lot of different places many of those places I went they spoke Spanish while I was on actually one trip in particular but I was in Argentina and I was traveling alone for some chunk of

it and what I love about traveling is meeting new people learning about their lives learning about their culture and in order to do that you have to be able to speak their language so on this trip even though I wasn't that confident in my Spanish speaking skills I never felt like I was very good at it I was surrounded by people that only spoke Spanish I really wanted to talk to them it took that kind of environment for me to come out of my shell and really practice speaking what I found is I got way

better at the language so much so quickly and not just that it was far more rewarding than it ever was in a classroom environment it was really interesting to to see how much progress I was able to make learning a foreign language in a pretty short period of time and then my co-founder Uh Kevin he studied French he's much more of a languages person than I am he's better at at foreign languages but he studied French and then he went to France and he had a really similar experience we didn't neither of us really wanted

like a sort of a highly structured lesson what we wanted was just similar to what we what we experienced when we traveled just a person to practice with Kevin wanted to learn French I wanted to learn Spanish but as we looked at the market overall we realized that the world really wants to learn English the biggest I think most important problem to solve in language learning and so we got started there and and we we said okay we're going to we're going to work on English education you know the first version of the app was

literally you press a button and within a few seconds either me or Kevin would answer the call and talk to you you yeah we personally you used to be likeing every student and it was a great way to learn we are native English speakers and so we are actually we were delivering the value that we promised our Learners it was a great way for us to meet Learners and actually really deeply understand their needs and what we needed to build we spent our day coding and building the product and then talking to our Learners and

and better understanding what we should build next that's how we got started that was many years ago uh focus on English and how long ago 10 years ago more yeah we started the company to we started working together in 2013 so it's been 11 over 11 years now it's when I started my YouTube channel oh great starting great businesses in 2013 it was a good year it was Good Year it was a good year and it's funny because you're mentioning this uh feeling you felt when you traveled for the first time to an Spanish speaking

country and that's exactly what I feel when I travel for example I've been here for 3 days now and I can tell that my English is already better because oh my god I've been speaking English every day 24 hours a day and I have the same feeling when I talk to a c tutor because it's like traveling but you're wherever you want to be wherever you need to be I used to feel even a little anxious and nervous to call the tutors but I think it's nice lots of my students tell you know share the

same feeling but it's nice because yeah it's real it's not a machine it's a person so you tend to get a little bit you know anxious or shy at the beginning but then you just go and start talking and your life starts changing because you're practicing the language right yeah I think what's great about Camp people often don't realize this until they start using it our tutors are there to help you like that is the whole reason they're there they tend to be really friendly they tend to be really patient you don't have to worry

about your English and what level it is at that's why they're yeah they're literally there to help you and if someone like you who's coming to the US and spending a few days here you'd much rather like work on your English on a safe uh or or a place that's designed for it like camp and then when you show up here in the country you're ready to go ready versus trying to work through all of that when you're in an environment where the people you're talking to aren't there to help you with your English I

think it's a it's a good reminder I think that yeah these tutors are here because they're they feel really passionate about helping Learners just like you and so don't feel shy about starting cuz like they love the work that they're doing and then they are here help you learn English better and so and what makes a c different from other platforms so a lot of different things I think in the early days we were perhaps the only platform that gave you true instant access to a native English speaker we were 100% native English speakers we

we built a mobile app really early on and we gave like literally instant access So within a few seconds you could be talking to native English speaker basically no one else who who's done it in that way back then and I think even now we're still kind of the only platform that gives you true instant access to native English speakers I think that separ us quite a bit and I think the reason we prioritized doing that and decided was so important is we wanted to make it really really easy learning language is hard enough as

is and I think what we found as we as we learned more about the language learning industry people were studying from books they were doing exercises they were kind of doing everything except for actually practicing speaking the language with a native speaker if your goal is to be able to speak English with a native speaker with an American for example you're not going to be able to achieve that without actually practicing doing that thing and it sounds kind of silly to say that but but I love the sports an analogies because I think they're they're

funny you know I'm a big skier I love to go skiing I always kind of talk about how it would be crazy to like buy a book off of Amazon uh read a book cover to cover and then say like now I know how to ski let me go to the top of the mountain like no one would ever do that but in fact actually that is actually the way the people approach English learning they study from books they do written exercises they do everything but actually speak and then they think that at the end

of that they'll be able to speak and it just it doesn't work that way no you you I I will always tell my students you're not going to learn everything and then learn how to speak you will learn English by speaking and doing stuff and making mistakes all the time that's how you learn I think that in itself I think that's great advice you give your students I think a lot of folks miss that uh and it's not I think this is not a Brazilian problem this is like a global language oring problem like there's

not enough investment in actually doing the thing you really want to do which is a speaking it's not necessarily because people don't understand that's important I think it's just easier to go to a bookstore and buy a book and study from it like just easier to do that than it is to like get a person right and so I think that's actually what we recognize this is actually a giant problem and Gap in the language learning process we think we can actually do better we think we can solve this and fill in that g yeah

it's easier because you don't need another person and it's also easier because you're not exposing yourself so I think this is really hard yeah and what do you believe is essential for a successful English learner yes we talked just we just talked a lot about the importance of speaking and so I think that's a really big part of that but actually I would go beyond that like I think what we're trying to do at camp is we first want to understand deeply what your goal is like what are you trying to achieve with English and

how can we help you get there on your entire Journey between showing up and having that goal to actually achieving it and and getting what you want out of English and so in order to do that what we do as Camp is we actually really try to personalize the experience for you one of the really valuable things about you know this one-on-one platform or these small group sessions is you can actually take the conversation where you want to go if you have a really specific goal say you have a job interview uh that you want

to pass you can join a a cam session and talk to your tutor and say Hey I want to practice for uh job interview can you help me do that and our tutors are really excited to actually tailor what they deliver to a specific learner's needs and not just that actually we have built and are continuing to build a lot of software to help with that even more we'd love to understand exactly what your goal is what your occupation is perhaps like you're actually pretty comfortable with everyday English you can you know order food at

a restaurant or strike up a conversation with a stranger when you get to the English that you actually need for your profession there's a lot of language and terminology that you don't know campy tries to understand like what is your job like what are you trying to use English for what is you know what is it's part of understanding your goal understanding like where do you hope to use English as you get better and better at it to the extent we understand your occupation or your interests we can actually focus on the on on that

type of English and so that's a couple examples of how campy tries to personalize the experience and it's something we're we're already doing today we deliberately actually get tutors from a lot of different backgrounds so you'll actually likely be able to find someone who shares your occupation on Camp if you're a business person another business person who's a native English speaker or if you're a medic professional you're doctor you can talk to a medical professional who's a a tutor on Camp and yeah and you have the search box so you can just type uh I

don't know medicine or whatever and then I think it's a good tool you were talking about the tutors so how does Camp select the tutors yeah it's a great question uh and it's something we've been learning more and more about over the years so our tutors actually as part of their application process they record a video they fil out a profile so we actually get to know a lot about them before they join the Camy platform and and we're actually quite select about who we choose and over the years we've learned what traits are most

important that deliver the best experience for our Learners our tutors are really patient that's something that I didn't know when we were getting started how important that would be in hindsight it makes sense that you want someone who's going to be really patient with you and and take their time to to let you work through your English what we do is we look at which tutors tend to do really well on the platform which tutors get really high ratings from our our Learners which tutors do Learners keep wanting to come back with and work with

over and over again and we use that to learn more and more about which are the best tutors to have so there's a whole process we've built over the years the net effect of it is you all will find a lot of really great tutors in Camp because they've been handpicked from a lot of folks that want to join and teach on the platform and the other thing I'll say is we've always cared a lot about diversity and so I talked a little bit about matching tutors with the right learner uh and like finding actually

the perfect tutor for you part of actually solving that problem is uh you need the right tutors on the platform we've been very deliberate to actually attract a lot of tutors from with different backgrounds uh not every learner wants the same kind of tutor people may want tutors with different styles different personal ities different occupational backgrounds we've actually been very deliberate to build actually quite a diverse community of tutors as well and what's the best way to find a tutor for me for example this is something that's really important I think one of the the

most critical parts of your journey on cambly is connecting with one or more tutors that are that are perfect for you it's why we are so careful about who we bring on as a tutor on the platform and why we care about building a really big diversity of tutors and so matching you with the perfect tutor for you is something really really critical we've actually been investing a lot in this in recent months and we actually just launched a feature that allows you to meet four tutors completely for free um after you buy your subscription

and it's it's actually to do just that like we actually think it's really important for you to meet many tutors to figure out who you going to really connect with who's going to be like the right tutor for you it's really hard to do that after just meeting one tutor because you have no comparison point we really really want to encourage Learners to meet multiple in their first week or two and we set up the system so it encourages you to do that and more broadly actually like we talked a bunch about how how we

want to personalize the experience for each learner but what we don't want to do is make it so you have to figure that out all out yourself we can deeply understand what Learners want and then we can actually guide them through the the process step by step one way we guide them is we say in your first week you should meet a bunch of tutors that's going to most likely lead your success but we don't stop there we actually kind of what do you do in your second week what do you do in your third

week how do we actually chart the course for you to achieve your goal and how do we paint a clear picture of how you're going to get there and actually be with you every step of the way and show you that you're actually making more and more prog progress to your towards your goal this is something we're really excited we don't think about ourselves as delivering great individual lessons we think about ourselves as is we actually going to deliver great English learning Journeys we're going to be there for you right when you start we're going

to understand where your English level is today we're going to understand where you want to get your English level to and we're going to help you every step of the way on the path from where you start to where you're going to get to it's something that I think we're we're really excited to do more on I don't think that language learning Solutions actually do a particularly good job at this in general and it's something we're really excited to to fill in and make way better than anything else that exists it sounds really exciting so

that's why Campell is so unique you're always investing in technology we're in the Silicon Valley so you we are in the right place so uh it's not just a platform where you will just talk to teachers and that's it no you're really investing on the journeys that was really nice to know so we were talking about technology and being in the Silicon Valley let's talk about AI have you been using or investing in AI to make students uh learn English faster yes it's a great question AI has been everywhere I'm sure a lot of you

have been hearing about Ai and all the advancements and the technology there it's very top of mind for us and and we are personally really really excited about specifically because of all the ways it can it can do exactly that it can help us deliver a much better and more comprehensive English education experience we are actually heavily investing in it the way we think about AI we think there are things that AI can do really well we also think there are things that tutors can do really well what we've hope to do with Camp is

actually bring you the best of both I think you can deliver a much better experience by combining uh AI with tutors that is what we're aimed at and so I'll give you a few examples of the types of things we've been investing in we are so we we recently launched what we call a placement quiz it's essentially a way for uh you to evaluate your English speaking level and it's completely powered by Ai and so it's a speaking test you can sign up and you can take it for free you take the test you speak

you answer a few questions you interact with our AI technology and at the end of it you get your English speaking level and you also get some specific feedback on your English things that you did well things that you have done better it's really interesting and Powerful technology and we'll be continuing to invest and make it way better and so another area I'm really excited about for those of you who have used cam before but maybe not uh recently launched a totally redesigned lesson review screen you think about Camp as you take these sessions you

learn in these video sessions but actually the learning doesn't stop there there's actually a ton of learning that can happen in between sessions in some ways that's powered by AI features like can we have personalized flashcards that let you study the vocabulary you want but in some ways that can actually be powered by the video Lesson the conversation you had with the tutor itself and so what you can do is you can review the the transcript from the video everything that was said we have the full transcript next to the the video um and we

are I've seen this already yeah we we you can jump to different parts of the conversation if you want to review different parts the tutors and the Learners can tag different moments where interesting things are happened and we're actually building more and more features on top of that where you'll soon be able to actually see what mistakes you made in your lesson and review those specific mistakes and so I think that that screen is actually going to become a really rich surface for for a lot of learning happens and we're investing a lot there and

a lot of that will be powered by AI as well at a high level what I think about you know I talked about humans plus Ai and how can we use the best of both to deliver the best possible experience we can for Learners I think the other thing we're leveraging AI is to like really really round out our English learning solution and so um historically we've been really focused on the speaking part because that's I think where we've seen is the biggest Gap in the the language learning industry but would like to become is

the holistic solution like we don't actually want you to have to use camp for one part of your English learning and other services for other parts like we want you to if we're going to really own the journey we kind of need to deliver on the whole experience we're heavily investing and I think leveraging AI technology to round out what we offer in the near future you'll be able to come to camp and you'll be able to do everything you need to learn English fully and you won't need to rely on anything else and you

know we were talking about all the Innovations and things that are coming up and coming out already but I remember one of the inovations which is uh Camp groups so these group lessons are really exciting because of course Camp is a place where you can talk to native speakers of the language but when you have the group lessons you can also talk to people from other parts of the world even non-native speakers of the language I've I've done you know uh lots of group lessons too so uh don't you think it's a nice opportunity for

people to join you know the world to be a part of the world too yeah that's exactly right I think I'm really excited about the group The the group's product because of exactly what you said like if you think about how people want to learn like how want to use their English a lot of our Learners are they work in business settings and they work they work with a very International set of colleagues they're speaking obviously not just in a one-on-one context but in a larger group group setting which is a pretty different Dynamic and

a different skill to learn so I think there's there's that aspect of just how do you navigate a group conversation but then there's also the aspect of they have a really International group of of folks and so you don't need to just understand Americans or people who are native English speakers but actually in a business setting you need to understand people who learned English as a second language similar similar to you and so it's actually really important to understand English with non-native speakers as well potentially understand accents and so the group's project is actually really

good for that because you can essentially simulate an international business setting by getting to meet other Learners from all over the world who may share a lot of interests may share your job have a similar career similar aspirations to you but they come from another country and so you can actually learn to interact with them as well amazing so that was really exciting I was really honored to hear about all these Innovations and new products thank you so much for talking to my audience and guys I have good news for you at the end of

this video so don't go speaking for Eng