SekaEi — English Learning Practice

SekaEi is a web app for Japanese university students to practise English. It has two tracks:

1. Pronunciation Practice — read a passage aloud; get instant per-word and per-phoneme accuracy scores powered by Azure AI Speech.
2. Real English (Idioms & Slang) — an idiom quiz with image-based multiple choice. (Work in progress.)

Access is invite-only: users sign up, then an admin approves their account.

1. Pick a passage — choose a built-in passage or paste your own text.
2. Record — your microphone turns on; read the passage aloud, then stop.
3. Get scored — every word is colour-coded within seconds:

Hover over any word to see a breakdown of each individual phoneme.

Overall scores for Accuracy, Fluency, Completeness, Prosody, and a combined Overall are shown at the top.

• Node.js v20 or later
• pnpm (npm install -g pnpm)
• An Azure AI Speech resource (free tier: 5 hours/month)
• A Supabase project (for auth + database)

git clone <repo-url>
cd SekaEi
pnpm install

cp .env.example .env

Fill in your Azure and Supabase credentials. All values are server-only; see .env.example for the full list.

pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Browser                          Nuxt/Nitro server          Azure
───────                          ─────────────────          ─────
getUserMedia (mic only)
  └─ AudioContext + Worklet ──► 16 kHz mono WAV Blob
                                  POST /api/assess ────────► Azure Speech SDK
                                                  ◄────────── per-word + phoneme scores
ScoreDisplay renders results

The Azure subscription key never leaves the server. The browser sends audio to /api/assess (your own Nitro endpoint), which proxies to Azure.

For a full directory-level map of the codebase, see docs/architecture.md.

If you want to swap out Azure, here are the other providers evaluated:

Swapping providers requires changing only server/utils/azure.ts and server/api/assess.post.ts.