When translation apps kept missing the point of his relationship, Matt built one that could keep up.
Matt, whose birth name is Siyuan Yan, is a software engineer and open source developer who spoke Mandarin and English when he first met his girlfriend, Akemi Mitamura, about a year ago. Mitamura is a native Japanese speaker, and the couple are currently long-distance.
“We met on a language-exchange app … where people from different language backgrounds can help others learn their language,” Matt, 27, told PEOPLE.
He said the app was poorly suited to “serious language learning,” and he could not find a replacement that worked for what he needed.
“Existing language apps frustrated me,” he said. “Most of them are designed around gamification and social features, optimized for engagement and profit, not for people who are seriously trying to learn.”
“And none of the translation tools out there are built for the kind of ongoing, everyday conversation that happens in a real relationship. They’ll translate a sentence, but they won’t remember that my girlfriend uses Kansai dialect, or that we have nicknames for each other that don’t translate literally,” he continued. “I wanted something that understood us, not just the languages.”
That frustration pushed him to build Aini, an app made for his relationship with Mitamura. He entered it in Anthropic’s “Built with Claude” contest in 2025, which challenges developers to create new ways to use the AI tool. He finished as one of the top three winners.
“As a software engineer, the technical side was manageable. I had the skills to put it together,” Matt said. “The hard part was the design: figuring out how to make it genuinely teach without being annoying. Nobody wants a grammar correction popping up in the middle of a sweet message from their partner. Getting that balance right took a lot of iteration, and Akemi was my toughest tester during the process.”
Matt said the app’s name means “I love you” in Chinese and also sounds natural as a name in Japanese.
He said Aini includes a memory feature that makes messages feel more personal.
“It’s the piece that lets the app actually understand us instead of just translating sentences in a vacuum,” he told PEOPLE.
“Behind every translation, the model gets a structured set of facts about who we are. Our legal names, our nicknames … our birth years. The fact that her mom is from Shanghai and her dad is from Japan, which matters because it changes which Mandarin words she’ll actually recognize,” he continued.
Matt said that feature helps the couple avoid “stiff, textbook polite” translated messages and lets them keep inside jokes, quirky references and pet names intact.
He said he is now fluent in Japanese, and that he and Mitamura plan to move to Tokyo together in August.
Matt also said the app may help far more people than just the two of them.
“I built Aini for us, but when it won the [“Build with Claude”] contest across over 200 entries, I realized we’re far from the only ones with this problem,” he said.
“There are couples across different languages everywhere, families where kids grew up in a different country, people trying to genuinely connect across a language gap, not just exchange words, but actually understand each other,” Matt continued.
“Translation tools give you the words but strip away everything personal: tone, humor, cultural context, events between the couple. I hope Aini shows that AI can preserve those things instead of erasing them,” he added.
Matt said he and Mitamura do not plan to stop using the app.
“The app started as a way to bridge the gap … but now it’s just part of how we talk. The memory keeps growing, and every conversation teaches us something new about each other’s language. That’s all I ever wanted it to do,” he said.
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