A French assistant that knows who you’re talking to

I’m a Brazilian learning French, and most of what I need to say depends on the situation: a comment in a design review, an email to someone I barely know. The tools I used didn’t let me set that context once and keep it.

Saving what I learned was worse. I’d ask, collect the phrases I wanted, export them into a file a flashcard app could read, and pay for that app just to practice them.

So I designed and built my own tool, connected to the Claude API.

Lexy doesn’t just translate a sentence. It looks at who you’re talking to, what you’re trying to say and how formal the moment is, then suggests French that fits.

That context is saved, so you only set it up once: a name, a short description of the situation, a tone (Casual, Neutral or Formal) and a channel (Spoken or Written). You switch contexts from a menu, and every answer is ranked for the active one.

Each phrase gets two scores: “In general” and “In this situation.” A sentence full of design jargon scores low in general but can score high in a design meeting.

You type what you want to say in your own language, and Lexy answers in French that fits the active context. In the recording, “I think this is perfect” becomes “Pour moi c’est nickel,” a casual way to say it in a design discussion, not a word-for-word translation.

The main answer is easy to spot, and alternatives are there when you want another way to say it. You can compare them and open any phrase without leaving the conversation. A useful answer first, not a wall of translations.

A phrase is more useful when you understand the choice behind it. Opening one shows a pronunciation guide, a literal back-translation and usage notes, plus an explanation tied to the active context.

In the recording, “I really like the spacing here” comes up in a design critique. Lexy explains the design vocabulary and the relaxed tone, and the two scores show the difference between everyday use and this specific setting.

Being a Brazilian learner also shaped Lexy’s most distinctive feature. Portuguese and French are close enough to set traps: words that look the same but mean something else, and structures that feel natural but sound off. Take “pretender”: in Portuguese it means to intend, but the French “prétendre” means to claim.

When a phrase has one of these traps, Lexy adds a “Watch out” note explaining the mistake a Brazilian would likely make and how to avoid it. A generic translator doesn’t warn you, because it doesn’t know which language you think in.

When an answer is worth keeping, you pick up the phrase and drop it onto a deck in the sidebar. Saving becomes part of exploring, not a separate routine of copying, exporting and importing into another app.

This also absorbed Kuori, an earlier idea of mine about learning the vocabulary that matters to you. In Lexy, that vocabulary comes from your own sentences and contexts.

Opening a deck turns your saved phrases into flashcards. Each card starts with what you wanted to say, and flipping it reveals the French, with pronunciation, meaning and usage notes. In the recording, “Could you repeat that?” flips to its French answer before moving through the deck.

Translation and practice now live in the same place, so the language you needed in a real situation becomes the language you come back to learn.

The motivation in Lexy starts with something real: saying what you actually need to say. Trying phrasings and reading explanations creates a loop of experimenting and getting feedback, what Octalysis calls Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback.

Saving phrases into your own decks adds Ownership and Possession, and practicing them supports Development and Accomplishment. Progress comes from building a vocabulary you’ll actually use, not from collecting points.

The working title was Comment on dit (“how do you say it”). It described the task well, but nobody gets attached to a task. I renamed it Lexy: short, friendly and tied to language, a name you could actually grow fond of.

The mascot carries the brand strategy. Lexy is a greyhound running with a roll of parchment in its mouth, and the parchment is your message. Lexy is the messenger: it gets your words where they need to go, quickly and faithfully, but the words are always yours.

That follows StoryBrand: you’re the hero and Lexy is the guide. The brand never takes the spotlight from the person speaking, which is also why its promise is to help you sound like yourself in French, not like a textbook.

It shapes how Lexy motivates, too. Unlike mascots that chase you about streaks, the greyhound never nags. It runs for you, not after you.

Early versions ran on mock data. With real translations, an answer took more than 20 seconds, and switching to the Claude API only brought it down to 17. So I changed the order: the best phrasing streams in first and the alternatives follow one by one. The first phrase now shows up in about 4 to 5 seconds.

Saving and practicing now happen where I find the phrases, so the export routine is gone. I cancelled the paid flashcard membership I was keeping just to study them.