Building With AI: Two Products, One Studio
There is a principle in yoga that practice reveals what theory only describes. You can read every book on breathwork and still not understand it until you sit with it for the first time and notice your own resistance.
Building with AI has felt the same way.
Green Yoga Inc started as a yoga studio. It has always also been a place where technology and embodied practice share space — I have been a cloud engineer for most of my career, and I run yoga classes in the same hours. That combination has led, somewhat inevitably, to building software.
In the past year, we shipped two products. Here is the honest story of both.
Lingua·Lab: the pronunciation gap
Language learning has a problem that nobody wants to say out loud: group instruction cannot give individual feedback on pronunciation. A teacher with 25 students in a 50-minute class has approximately two minutes per student — and most of that time is spent on comprehension and vocabulary, not on the fine-grained sound production that separates someone who is understood from someone who is clear.
Lingua·Lab is an AI tutor we built to close that gap. It listens to spoken Italian, French, or Spanish and returns phoneme-level coaching in seconds. Not a score. Not a red/green indicator. Actual feedback on what specifically is off and what to do about it — the kind a private tutor would give.
The AI integration here is central, not decorative. The speech-to-text runs on faster-whisper deployed as an AWS Lambda. The pronunciation analysis runs through GPT-5.5, tuned specifically to each language phonological system — Tuscan Italian vowels are not the same problem as Parisian French nasals, and the model needs to know the difference.
For teachers: the Classroom tier ($6/student/month) adds a dashboard with weekly reports — practice minutes, accuracy trends, students who need attention. For solo learners: $99/year, less than two private lessons.
14-day free trial at lingua-lab.org.
ContentFlows: the content bottleneck
Green Yoga Inc publishes newsletters, blog posts, and social media across several platforms. For a long time I did this manually, which meant it happened inconsistently, which meant the audience relationship suffered.
ContentFlows is the platform we built to fix that. It writes newsletters, blog posts, LinkedIn updates, Instagram captions, and Facebook posts — scheduled, brand-tuned, and ready to publish with one click. The AI learns your brand voice, works to a content calendar, and queues everything for a single human review before it goes live.
We built ContentFlows for ourselves first. Green Yoga Inc has been running on it for months. The newsletter you may have received recently, the social posts — ContentFlows drafted most of them. The AI integration here is GPT-5.5 at the content generation layer, with a human-in-the-loop approval step that I think is non-negotiable for anything going out under your name.
It is now available to other small businesses: contentflows.cc, 14-day free trial.
What AI integration actually looks like
Neither product uses AI as a feature. AI is the function — without it, the product does not exist. This is a different kind of integration than adding a chatbot to a website or generating product descriptions in bulk.
What I have learned from shipping both:
Specificity beats generality. A general language AI gives general language feedback. GPT-5.5 tuned to Castilian Spanish phonology gives feedback that is actually useful to a Spanish learner. Investing in the prompt and the evaluation framework matters more than the model tier.
Human review is not a weakness. ContentFlows has a deliberate approval step before anything publishes. Some people ask why it is not fully automated. Because the cost of a tone-deaf post is higher than the cost of two minutes of review. The AI does 95% of the work; the human catches the 5% that would undermine trust.
Infrastructure is not optional. Both products run on AWS — Lambda, RDS PostgreSQL, S3, CloudFront, SES. The AI calls are one part of a system that needs to be reliable, observable, and deployable. Yoga teachers do not want to hear that the pronunciation tool is down. Neither do small business owners waiting on their newsletter.
If you are a language teacher, a language learner, or a small business owner who knows they should be publishing more consistently — one of these was probably built with you in mind.
Both are at the 14-day free trial stage. No credit card required.
- lingua-lab.org — AI pronunciation tutor for Italian, French, and Spanish
- contentflows.cc — AI content automation for small businesses