Tell Me More and Rosetta Stone: The first commercial language apps (1987)

Tell Me More and Rosetta Stone were the flagship products of the first commercial era of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) — the two decades, roughly from the late 1980s until the rise of the smartphone, when learning a language with a computer became something you could buy in a box. Where PLATO (1960) had proven on university mainframes that a computer could teach a language, Auralog in France and Fairfield Language Technologies in the United States proved that people, companies and governments would pay for it. One company bet on speech recognition, the other on translation-free immersion — and their rise, rivalry and eventual merger tell the story of an entire era of language technology.

Tell Me More and speech recognition

Auralog was founded in France in 1987 by Maurice Lévy, around an idea that sounded close to science fiction at the time: using automatic speech recognition to teach foreign language pronunciation. Personal computers of the late 1980s could barely process audio at all, and Auralog became one of the first companies in the world to build language courseware around a speech engine. In the mid-1990s it released Talk to Me, a CD-ROM course in which the learner spoke into a microphone and the software judged the response — accepting or rejecting it, scoring pronunciation, and displaying waveform and pitch curves so the learner could compare their utterance with a native model. Its error-detection system could even point to the specific word a learner had mispronounced.

The flagship Tell Me More line, launched in the late 1990s, grew this into a full multimedia platform: interactive dialogues driven by speech recognition, grammar and vocabulary exercises, video with cultural content, and assessment, placement and certification testing aligned with the CEFR levels. At its peak the platform offered up to 2,000 hours of instructional content and over 35 activity types per language, across nine languages, at beginner, intermediate, advanced and business levels.

Commercially, Auralog took a different path from its American rival: instead of chasing individual consumers, it focused on companies, universities and public institutions. By the early 2010s, roughly 95% of its business came from corporate and higher-education customers, and the company — by then operating as Tell Me More S.A. — served more than 3,000 organizations across Europe, the United States, Latin America and China.

Rosetta Stone and dynamic immersion

Rosetta Stone began with a personal observation. Allen Stoltzfus, an American who had learned German by living in Germany, later tried to learn Russian in a classroom and found the contrast frustrating: immersion had felt natural, the classroom did not. In the 1980s he began looking for a way to simulate immersion with a computer, and enlisted his brother-in-law John Fairfield, who held a PhD in computer science. Only around 1992 did CD-ROM technology make the idea practical — a single disc could finally hold the thousands of photographs and audio recordings the method required. Together with Allen’s brother Eugene Stoltzfus they founded Fairfield Language Technologies in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and named their product after the artifact that unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs: The Rosetta Stone.

The method, later marketed as Dynamic Immersion, was radical in its simplicity: no translations, no grammar explanations, no use of the learner’s native language at all. The learner sees a set of photographs, hears and reads sentences in the target language, and works out the meaning by matching sound to image — the way, the company argued, children acquire their first language. Critics pointed out the obvious limits of the analogy: an adult learning Mandarin from photographs is not a toddler immersed in it for years, some abstract grammar simply cannot be conveyed by pictures, and the same photo set was reused across languages regardless of cultural context. But the format was distinctive, instantly recognizable, and — crucially for a boxed product — required no teacher.

The company sold early versions to schools, government agencies and the US military, and grew steadily through institutional contracts before turning to consumers. In 2006 it renamed itself Rosetta Stone Inc., after its own product — by then far better known than the corporate name.

The business model of the CD-ROM era

Commercial CALL of the 1990s and 2000s was premium-priced packaged software. Rosetta Stone became famous for its bright yellow boxes, sold for hundreds of dollars per level — a full multi-level bundle could cost more than $500. The company built a direct-to-consumer machine that was unusual for software: kiosks in airports and shopping malls where travelers could try the demo, plus relentless television, radio and print advertising. Tell Me More, meanwhile, sold licenses and later SaaS subscriptions to corporations and universities. Both models assumed the same thing: that language software was scarce, serious and worth a significant one-off investment.

The peak of the era came on April 16, 2009, when Rosetta Stone went public on the New York Stock Exchange — one of the first IPOs after the financial crisis, with shares jumping 39% on the first day. That same year the company published the study it would lean on in marketing for years: an independent-but-commissioned evaluation by Roumen Vesselinov (City University of New York), which found that 55 hours of Rosetta Stone Spanish produced, on average, enough proficiency gain to cover about one semester of college Spanish. The study was legitimate but modest — a small self-selected sample, substantial dropout, and “one semester per 55 hours” is a sober result rather than a miracle — and linguists such as Stephen Krashen publicly argued that the marketing claims built on it went far beyond the evidence.

Decline and legacy

What ended the CD-ROM era was not a better box but a different distribution model. Smartphones put a language course in every pocket, app stores reduced the price of entry to zero, and Duolingo (2011) made free, gamified, mobile-first learning the default expectation. A $300 yellow box could not compete with a free app on economics, and could not compete with a phone on convenience. Rosetta Stone’s stock slid from its IPO highs, the kiosks closed in the early 2010s, and the company pivoted — painfully — from packaged software to online subscriptions and enterprise and school sales.

Consolidation followed. On December 11, 2013, Rosetta Stone announced the acquisition of Tell Me More S.A. for approximately $28 million (€20.75 million including assumed debt); the deal closed on January 8, 2014. The pioneer of speech recognition in language learning was absorbed by its old rival for a fraction of former valuations, its technology folded into Rosetta Stone’s corporate offering, and the Tell Me More brand was retired soon after. Rosetta Stone itself changed hands twice in quick succession: acquired by Cambium Learning Group in 2020 for $792 million, then sold on to IXL Learning in March 2021, where it continues today as a subscription app.

What this means for language learning

The commercial era left two permanent contributions. From Tell Me More came speech recognition: the idea that software should listen to the learner and give feedback on pronunciation, which every serious language app now treats as standard. From Rosetta Stone came the conviction — and the marketing proof — that millions of people would pay to learn a language with software rather than in a classroom. What neither product had was a model of human memory: both could present material and check answers, but neither knew when a learner was about to forget a word, so review was left to chance. That missing piece came from spaced repetition, pioneered commercially by SuperMemo (1990) — developed in the same years, in a different tradition, and ultimately more consequential for how modern apps schedule learning. A present-day language app is, in effect, the multimedia interactivity of the CD-ROM era combined with a memory algorithm and the mobile-first distribution that Duolingo proved out.

Frequently asked questions

Were Tell Me More and Rosetta Stone really the first commercial language apps?

They were not the first language software sold for money — simple drill programs existed for 8-bit home computers in the early 1980s. They were, however, the first big multimedia brands of commercial language learning: full courses with audio, images and speech recognition, sold at scale to consumers and institutions. Calling them “apps” is an anachronism — they were CD-ROM packages and later online platforms — but they occupied exactly the market that mobile apps occupy today.

Did the Rosetta Stone method actually work?

Partially. The commissioned 2009 study by Roumen Vesselinov found that 55 hours with Rosetta Stone Spanish roughly covered one college semester of material — a real but unspectacular effect. The translation-free immersion method is genuinely engaging for concrete vocabulary and basic sentence patterns, but researchers criticized it for leaving grammar implicit, reusing identical picture sets across unrelated languages, and marketing itself with claims (“learn like a child”) that the evidence did not support.

Do Tell Me More and Rosetta Stone still exist?

Tell Me More does not: after the 2014 acquisition its technology was merged into Rosetta Stone’s business products and the brand was retired. Rosetta Stone survives as a subscription-based app and enterprise platform, owned since March 2021 by IXL Learning — no longer the dominant name in the market it once defined, but still one of its oldest living brands.

Sources:

1. Rosetta Stone Inc. — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone_Inc.
2. “Rosetta Stone to Acquire Leading International Language Company Tell Me More”, press release, December 11, 2013 (SEC Form 8-K exhibit): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001351285/000110465913089542/a13-26075_1ex99d1.htm
3. Roumen Vesselinov, Measuring the Effectiveness of Rosetta Stone, City University of New York, January 2009: https://www.vesselinov.com/Effectiveness%20Study%202008_RS.pdf
4. “Rosetta Stone to Go Public, Ending IPO Dry Spell”, The Washington Post, April 2, 2009: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2009/04/02/rosetta-stone-to-go-public-ending-ipo-dry-spell/989bd821-74d8-4a02-9814-caacd36fefde/
5. “Cambium Learning Group Completes Its Sale of Rosetta Stone Languages Division to IXL Learning”, GlobeNewswire, March 17, 2021: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/03/17/2194506/0/en/Cambium-Learning-Group-Completes-Its-Sale-of-Rosetta-Stone-Languages-Division-to-IXL-Learning.html
6. Graham Davies et al., “CALL (computer assisted language learning)”, LLAS Centre, University of Southampton: https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk//www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/61.html