Our language-learning products started as a research project in 2003 at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) under funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

DARPA Program Manager Dr. Ralph Chatham was inspired to support the project after listening to one of the first soldiers who went into Afghanistan in 2002. The captain told how he and his comrades reluctantly rode on tiny ponies into a town, totally relying on their Northern Alliance escorts who only spoke Pashto and some broken Russian and Arabic while the U.S. soldiers only spoke English and some broken Russian and Arabic. When the town’s people came out on the streets the soldiers did not know if they were friendly or hostile from their gestures, demeanor and words.

Dr. Chatham explains, “I wanted to ensure that no American soldier or Marine would again ride blind into a foreign culture. I challenged the research community to create a training tool that would teach the brain behind every trigger finger and behind every steering wheel a bit of the gestures, culture and mission-oriented vocabulary of the land they were in. I also told the researchers that they had to perform the training with only two discontinuous weeks of contact time with the students.”