| --- |
| title: French Coach |
| emoji: 🗼 |
| colorFrom: indigo |
| colorTo: yellow |
| sdk: gradio |
| sdk_version: "6.17.3" |
| app_file: app_custom.py |
| pinned: true |
| license: apache-2.0 |
| tags: |
| - build-small-hackathon |
| - backyard-ai |
| - best-minicpm-build |
| - off-brand |
| - best-agent |
| - best-demo |
| - bonus-quest-champion |
| - track:backyard |
| - sponsor:openbmb |
| - achievement:offgrid |
| - achievement:offbrand |
| - achievement:fieldnotes |
| --- |
| |
| # 🇫🇷 French Coach |
|
|
| **A living French notebook that turns your class notes into practice — built for a real person studying for Canada's TEF/TCF exams.** |
|
|
| French Coach is a Backyard-AI study tutor for an adult learning French on a four-month |
| timeline for Canadian immigration (target CLB/NCLC 7). It collapses the usual mess of |
| class notes plus three browser tabs (translate / pronounce / gender-check) into one |
| surface — and adds practice the learner can't get between classes. |
|
|
| It runs on **self-hosted MiniCPM models** — nothing leaves the Space. |
|
|
| ## What it does |
|
|
| - **Smart notebook.** Write or paste class notes. Nouns are colored by gender at a |
| glance; click any word for its meaning, gender, and a one-line grammar note, with |
| pronunciation on tap. Saved pages are auto-titled and categorized by a curator pass. |
| - **The Coach Agent.** The core feature. From the current lesson it produces a set of |
| 5–7 mixed exercises (fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, error detection, reorder, |
| translation) through a **plan → generate → critique → revise** loop — a small |
| multi-step agent that grounds each set in the lesson *and* the official A1–A2 CEFR |
| syllabus, then reviews its own output for a single unambiguous answer before showing |
| it. It's not a one-shot prompt; it checks and fixes its own work. |
| - **Visual exercises.** MiniCPM-V reads an image and the app generates French |
| comprehension questions grounded in what's actually in it. |
| - **Chat coach, dialogue, and pronunciation practice**, all grounded in the lesson. |
| - **Encouraging by design.** Points are additive only — never deducted, never tied to |
| correctness. The daily summary leads with gains and frames gaps as "ready to practice |
| next." No streaks to lose, no red error states, no shaming. Ever. |
|
|
| ## How it's built |
|
|
| - **Models (all under the 32B cap, self-hosted on ZeroGPU):** |
| - **MiniCPM4.1-8B-Instruct** — text reasoning: the Coach Agent, chat, word cards, |
| grammar tools, summaries. |
| - **MiniCPM-V 4.6** (~1.3B) — vision: reads images for the visual exercises. |
| - <!-- BREAK-GLASS: if text runs via API instead of self-hosting, change the line |
| above to: "text runs on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct via the HF Inference API; vision |
| runs on MiniCPM-V 4.6." Keep it accurate to what actually shipped. --> |
| - **Custom UI** built with **gr.Server** + a React frontend served through the Gradio |
| app — past the default Gradio look (Off-Brand). |
| - **Gradio SDK Space** under the `build-small-hackathon` org. |
| - **Supabase** (hosted Postgres) for persistence: notebook pages, exercises, and an |
| append-only points ledger. |
| - Deterministic French NLP (gender / part-of-speech / lemma) via spaCy runs instantly, |
| offline; only meaning, grammar, exercises, and dialogue hit the LLM. |
| |
| ## Why it's more than a chatbot wrapper |
|
|
| The gender-mapped notebook, the image-grounded visual exercises, and above all the |
| **Coach Agent's self-critique loop** make this a tool that reasons in multiple steps, |
| not a single LLM call behind a text box. |
|
|
| ## Links |
|
|
| - 🎬 Demo video: https://www.loom.com/share/7b96f5523d104e99a1834509c5d57e1f |
| - 📣 Social post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/asma-fariha_buildsmall-smallllms-minicpm-share-7472418971804381184-Or_C/ |
| - Built on MiniCPM (OpenBMB). Made for one real learner — and dogfooded daily. |
|
|
