Show HN: Flowery – Vocabulary builder powered by LLM and spaced repetition

[the_florist]

Dear hackers:

Whether English is your first or nth natural language, you may be familiar with this vexing experience: You encounter a flowery word in a book, podcast, or HN comment; you endeavor to memorize it to hone your speech and writing; you purge it from your synapses by the next day.

Flowery (https://flowery.app) streamlines vocabulary building by: • Rendering a typographically pristine Oxford dictionary and thesaurus. • Conjuring up the stochastic parrot to eliminate the tedium of flashcard creation. • Scheduling the flashcards with a spaced repetition algorithm.

About the tech stack:

The server is built on Rust, Axum, and PostgreSQL. The client is built on Google’s Lit. We are betting the farm on the web—you won’t find Flowery on any app store. We have gone to great lengths to polish UX, especially on iOS where we rolled our own virtual keyboard, textboxes, and text selection. We strive to make Flowery an exemplar of the quasi-native web app.

Non-obvious features to try:

• “Add to Home Screen” on iOS. • “Add to Dock” on macOS Sonoma. • Install on Android and desktop Chrome. • Append an ellipsis to search by prefix. • Touch a flashcard’s blank for a hint. • Keyboard navigation inspired by the one true editor.

Give it a whorl [sic] and share your thoughts!

Florally yours,

The Florist

[watchblob]

Overall, I like the idea a lot: it's Anki specifically for building your vocabulary. That said, I struggled a lot with the UX.

I think you need to make it more obvious that this is a preview and today you can only use words starting with S.

Changing the initial text in the search to 'Try searching for a word beginning with S...' would go a long way.

I'd also explain the product to people a bit more when on the landing page (without the copy above I would have been baffled) rather than launching them straight into it.

The login / sign up experience is a bit confusing. UX wise the view conflates sign up / login with information about the browser extensions. In my view, it's also a bit early to force people to use passkeys as the only way to login. Regardless, the whole button should be clickable rather than just the key.

The flying text is quite distracting.

On desktop, it's really not obvious that there is a button at the bottom right which has a lot of settings.

I also think there are very few people who would commit to spending $15.64 a month (1564 is Shakespeare's birthdate - nice) without some sort of free trial or at least having more of a go at using the app with more words than just daily one.

Sorry if that's harsh but that's my honest view. As I said, I like the idea overall. There is very little chance I'd spend $15.64 on this as it stands or if ever though.

[the_florist]

Thanks for the constructive criticism! There’s definitely room for improvement.

The design was intended to be minimalistic, but perhaps overly so. The preview could indeed be clarified: The letter corresponds to the day of the month, so the A headwords are unlocked on the 1st. Today’s the 19th, hence S.

The cards in the login/signup sheet are notifications, but I agree that the (non-dismissible) signup notification should be clickable. It’s not obvious that the padlock and key icons are buttons. As for passkeys, I do think they are ready for prime time, but password-less login will require user-friendly onboarding. The terse explanation on the Help page doesn’t cut it.

The five words sliding across the home page are currently hard-coded, but will soon cycle every weekday. You can turn off this upcoming “word-a-day” feature at https://flowery.app/settings.

I’m delighted that someone caught the Shakespeare reference! The product’s value should converge to its price as it evolves.

[watchblob]

I've just tried it on mobile. What's the reason for building a custom keyboard?

[BoggleFiend]

Congrats on adding a project supposedly using an LLM to you resume, but it doesn't seem to do anything useful. "fox" and "beta" both led to a small shake, which as a user I would think indicates they are not words in the English language. "Flowery" returned a definition of: "full of, re­sem­bling, or smelling of flow­ers—e.g., a flow­ery meadow, flow­ery wall­pa­per"

This app appears to be a limited but somewhat artsy front-end for an (incomplete) dictionary

[the_florist]

The dictionary preview is limited to the nth letter of the alphabet, where n is the day of the month, as hinted by the search box’s placeholder.

Try looking up any word that starts with S, assuming it’s June 19th in your time zone.

[kebsup]

I've built a llm powered, srs app as well! https://vocabuo.com There is a generous freemium, or yearly at 30USD/year.

The supported languages are English, German and Spanish.

If you have any feedback or want a discount please let me know!

[spencerchubb]

I think you should make a website that trains people to do the opposite - use simple language

[mdp2021]

What about "precise".

And: remember you are supposed to be strict in expressing and loose in interpreting. You have to interpret, you need that vocabulary - it is already around...

And: you know, sophisticated concepts (which we sometimes name) help building a sophisticated mind - which is better suited to deal with a complex world. (The opposite being e.g. "newspeak".)

[closetkantian]

I like the typeface and concept but I found the site somewhat confusing to use. Also, I feel like it should recommend some difficult vocab words for me to check out, based on say a quiz to get a baseline sense of my current vocabulary.

[the_florist]

The timeless elegance of Caslon.

Features to discover vocabulary are on the drawing board. In the short term, a “word-a-day” feature will recommend five words per week, but the time-tested method for a rich vocabulary is reading, so the long-term ambition is a built-in ebook reader, where saving words would be frictionless and context-aware.

In the meantime, you can browse the index, which is biased toward uncommon words:

https://flowery.app/words/a%2E%2E%2E

The ellipsis is a general operator that searches by prefix.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Get in touch if you want to extend this to other languages! I have a locally-hosted stack that does a very similar thing for Finnish, taking a few cues from the academic literature on how to build high-quality exposure to words.

[luke-stanley]

Sounds like an interesting idea that's worth doing but I couldn't figure out why there was a weird keyboard, and that my keyboard wasn't available.

[blondin]

not sure how to use this app.

[infecto]

Absolutely no idea how to use the app either. It wanted me to type an s word? So I typed store and hit enter, it gave me the definition of store. Very very confusing workflow.

Also absolutely clueless how this relates to a LLM.

[unshavedyak]

Glad I’m not the only one. I was left baffled at what I should be doing, thought it was because I was on my phone

[latenightcoding]

very confusing UI

[rendall]

It is subscription only at $15.64/month