GrapeSEED
2025–presentFounding Designer & Engineer, AI Product
I build GrapeSEED Tutor — an AI tutor that guides young children from early phonics and reading to real spoken conversation in English. As the founding designer and engineer, I own the product across the stack: the interaction design of a child’s first conversation, the real-time voice pipeline and interactive lessons behind it, and the backend and tooling that keep it running.
Built end to end
The app children learn in
The full client application, built from zero — interactive video lessons, phonics, reading and handwriting practice, and real-time AI voice conversation, across more than a dozen activity types from listen-and-write to pronunciation scoring. A voice pipeline, lesson player, and modular activity engine drive it all, shipped through a GitHub Actions and EAS pipeline with over-the-air updates and native builds.
The backend that powers it
A GraphQL service with row-level security and automated migrations, deployed on Vercel for a small team moving fast. I designed the data model, auth flows, and content-delivery architecture.
The tools that fill it
An internal CMS where the curriculum team authors everything the app teaches — lessons, readers, phonics, and interactive video activities — with a Mux pipeline for lesson video and AI-generated illustration art. Its centerpiece is a visual conversation designer built on a state-machine model: non-engineers compose the tutor’s dialogue, AI generates the branching transitions, and the flow can be tested live against the realtime voice tutor.
Earlier
I first joined GrapeSEED as a research intern in 2021, exploring whether conversational AI could teach English on its own. The prototype I built already gestured at what the product does today — open-ended conversation, structured lessons, and pronunciation feedback for young learners — and laid the groundwork for what I’m now building full-time.
View the 2021 prototype on GitHub ↗