Zheren Hu

Cofounder, Liulishuo

Search every verified Zheren Hu interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Zheren Hu, cofounder and CEO of Liulishuo, discussed the company's work on AI-based English learning at a 2017 event. He described his background in electrical engineering and computer science, including a PhD from Princeton and prior experience as a product manager at Google, before cofounding the company in China. Hu stated that Liulishuo has developed speech recognition technology aimed at assessing and improving English pronunciation for Chinese speakers, and he recounted an anecdote in which Apple's Phil Schiller scored 83 out of 100 on a simple sentence using the app, attributing the result to his Boston accent. Hu also presented data from a two-month experiment involving 400 volunteers who used the AI teacher on their mobile phones. According to Hu, 60% of participants improved by at least one level on the CEFR language proficiency framework, with those students averaging 36.5 hours of study during the period. He noted that the company has users in over 175 countries and that its adaptive learning framework is designed to work for speakers of various native languages, including Japanese and Korean.