Blake Ho
@BlakeLinguist
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Cambridge Linguist × AI Engineer | Building Caruso for more effective language learning
London
Joined October 2025
Hi, I'm Blake and this is my first tweet. I'm excited to share my journey of building Caruso, a language app I wish had existed. I love languages and building things, and I'm doing this in public. Read on to hear my story: ↓
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Created Halloween themed Spanish lessons on Caruso Languages app 🎃 Access it here:
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Just created a simple dashboard to view my daily/monthly active users, most popular language learning topics/skills/dialogues. It's not much, but it's honest work!
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As a co-founder, you have to be the one driving every single initiative. It's up to you to seek out new users, press for user feedback. Nobody is going to help you but you yourself! #buildinpublic
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There’s a nice feeling to starting a fresh GitHub repository, all fresh before I start piling my messy code in!
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A startup doesn’t compete with others. It competes with its own exhaustion.
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Just searched "What is your surname" in Spanish into Google search, expecting to factcheck my Spanish translation and the AI Feature took it personally. "Google doesn't have a surname, because it is not a person. It's a tech company and search engine that started off as a PhD
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Printed out these eye-catching posters for our Language Learning App! Thinking of putting them up around the wework for a bit! Or carrying them with me on the tube for people to scan them/approach me if they're interested! #Marketing #CarusoLanguages
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Just launched Caruso for learning Spanish yesterday. Have had 20 logins for my language learning app so far. They're mostly friends. But not everyone wants to learn Spanish. If you have any advice on how I can acquire users organically, leave a reply! #LanguageLearning
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Prompt Engineering is the bread and butter of Caruso. I’m currently winging it as I go 😎 but need to approach it with some proper techniques and structure as I scale. That’s why I’m at @PromptEngConf today!
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Taking a day off (not really) to attend @PromptEngConf ! Looking forward to learning about topics like Context Engineering, MCP and Prompt Optimisation Techniques!
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Your customers don’t want products. They want to FEEL understood. Connect on emotions. Listen more than you speak. Empathy creates loyalty. That’s your hidden growth engine.
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Sneak peek of Caruso - my interest-based language learning app - teaching you Spanish and also how to flirt 😘 out Friday!
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7. Moral of the story. Don’t switch API providers the day of your launch.
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6. After testing Gemini a bit more, I was getting weird bugs where the speech would be repeated twice or the speech would translate the words instead of just reading it out. Decided to go back to OpenAI’s TTS.
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5. Sent a support ticket, but it would take 2 working days. Decided to refactor it to use Gemini API again. I originally avoided it because there’s no native Python package to convert between audio formats. So I had to add use subprocess to add this tool called FFMPEG.
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4. I was getting errors after successive API calls (generating speech turns in a dialogue). Turns out Google Cloud rate limits you to 1 request per min. No way to increase unless you go to their support and they need to approve your use case. FML
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