But Pablo, how do I order a coffee?

tl;dr: I build a minimalist AI Chatbot based Spanish Learning System I’ve dubbed Pablo.

I made dis… <- Me sometime around 7-6-2026, 10:24am

I named it after Pablo from Dreaming Spanish…

This is both out of respect but also out of a niggling question, the question of this page’s title…

Dreaming Spanish is a app/website which works on the theory of comprehensible input, which is listening to language that is too hard for you but not by much. By listening the theory is your brain works out new things from context. It’s an approach that ignores grammar and expects the learner to speak late. Videos on the platform are graded and on a great many topics.

Before my trip to Peru last year I listened to over 200 hours of content.

This was not my first time in Peru. I went when I was 27 and backpacked around Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina. I have struggled to work on my Spanish since.

My Spanish is not good. And before my recent trip I was alive to a problem, to a paradox. This paradox is that while I ultimately aspire to what I call trancendent Spanish where I am fluent the Spanish I needed to build and re-built for this trip is what I call Phrasebook Spanish.

The question becomes where does Dreaming Spanish exist in the language learning landscape. The answer I came to was it’s for playing the long game of transcendent Spanish. Pablo is quite particular about the method working best if you speak late once you’ve internalised the rules. Hence my ? Pablo, how do I order that coffee?

So I built my own web phrasebook which takes Spanish phrases and uses a computer generated voice to allow listening to those phrases on loop. It’s called Wiggly Spanish. This building happened before my recent trip to Peru.

I even found a clever way to practice these phrases, that is to use another product called Aqua Voice which can convert Speech to Text, that is in my case spoken Spanish to spanish on the screen.

Having spoken some Spanish already the app could understand me. It still makes some mistakes, even when I speak clearly, but it is usable for its purpose.

I used it for practice but not enough. Very recently I actually revisited this tool, cleaned up some over long pages in my Spanish learning material and added a feature which I think will help its usability.

I simply added a text entry box down the bottom. It doesn’t do save or anything, just provides a scratch pad to speak into using Aqua Voice.

(I might note too that Aqua Voice has a really helpful feature. It provides a count of total words spoken to it over the life of the product. Given the fact I set it to use Spanish immediately I have a count of how many words I’ve spoken into it each day which I log to a Spreadsheet.)

But this article is not primarily about Wiggly Spanish it’s about Pablo and what comes next in my learning journey…