Envigo is a quiet little Android app for adult Mandarin speakers who already live in the United States — or who want to. It does not gamify English. It does not pretend you have time for a 20-minute lesson. It asks one thing: when you see something you want to name in English, take a photograph of it.
"I stopped pointing at things at the laundromat. I just say the words now."
The English you will actually use is the English attached to the kettle, the highway sign, the laundry label in front of you. We built Envigo around that one observation.
The kettle, the highway sign, the label on the laundry bottle. A photograph of the thing in front of you beats a flashcard in your pocket every time.
ML Kit runs on your phone. Faces are mosaicked before anything else happens. The image that goes to the cloud is already anonymous. We never see the original.
Not a streak, not a guilt trip. FSRS — the same spaced-repetition model used by serious learners — resurfaces the words you are about to forget, calibrated to you.
No typing. No deck-building. No "today's lesson." You raise the phone, Envigo does the rest, and by the time you put it down you know three new words for the room you are in.
The whole loop is built to disappear into your day. Here is what the four minutes actually look like — measured, not aspirational.
Privacy should not require a privacy policy and a law degree to read. Here it is, in a conversation.
FSRS — Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler — was open-sourced in 2022 and is the same model that powers the most-respected flashcard apps. We just connected it to a camera.
Raise the phone. Frame the scene. Faces blur before anything else happens.
Cloud-side recognition returns the objects in frame. Tap the ones you want to learn.
English, IPA, your native gloss, one example sentence. Save or skip — your call.
FSRS resurfaces each word at the moment you are about to forget it. That is the whole schedule.
Three learners, three neighborhoods, three different reasons they picked up the phone.
"I stopped pointing at things at the laundromat. I just say the words now — 'the lint trap,' 'the dryer sheet.' The guy behind the counter doesn't even look up."
"I used to freeze at the pharmacy counter. Now I just say what I need. The first time I asked for 'pseudoephedrine' out loud I think I surprised myself more than the pharmacist."
"Twelve weeks. Three hundred words. I can read the labels at the grocery store without Google Translate. The kids stopped translating for me at dinner, which is the moment I knew this was working."
Envigo is for users 18 and over. The gate is a feature, not a marketing checkbox: it keeps the content the language actually requires, and it keeps minors out of an experience designed around the world adults navigate. We verify once, at install, and we do not retain identifying data from the check.
If your question is not here, write to us — we read every email.
Envigo is free to install and free to use for up to ten new words and twenty reviews per day — that is enough for most people to make real progress. A small optional pack called Envigo Plus ($4.99/month or $39/year) removes those caps and adds offline mode, larger example corpora, and priority ML Kit fallback.
No subscription is required to keep what you have already saved. We will never delete words you learned because a card expired.
Envigo runs on Android 8.0 (API 26) and above, which covers roughly 96% of Android devices in the United States. It needs a back camera (any phone made after 2016 has one) and about 200 MB of free space. It does not run on iOS yet — we are a small team and we are shipping one platform at a time.
Tablets work. Chromebooks with Android app support work. Wear OS, Android Auto, and Android TV are not supported.
At install, Envigo asks a single binary question — are you 18 or older? — and you tap yes or no. We do not ask for a date of birth, an ID, a credit card, or any other proof. The answer is stored locally on your device, hashed; we receive a single boolean (is_adult: true|false) and that is the end of it.
If Google Play Store is the source of install on your device, the Play age-screening is also in effect for users in regions where it is required.
Three things happen, in order. First, ML Kit detects any faces in the frame and mosaics them — entirely on your device, no network call. Second, the mosaicked image is sent to a Cloudflare Worker for scene recognition; the worker returns a list of object labels and forgets the image immediately. Third, your phone deletes the original photograph from the app's sandboxed cache within thirty seconds.
We do not back up these images. We do not sync them across devices. We do not put them in any training set. If you would like the technical walk-through, the privacy page above has the longer version.
Partially. Reviewing what you have already saved works fully offline — FSRS lives on your device and never needs the cloud. Saving new words from a photo does require a network connection, because scene recognition runs server-side. Envigo Plus adds an offline scene-recognition model that fits in roughly 80 MB and runs on-device via LiteRT.
You can pre-download a region of saved words for offline use at any time, from Settings → Storage.
Yes. If you have used Envigo Plus for fewer than fourteen days and you do not think it is worth what you paid, write to hello@velorynlabs.com and we will refund the full amount, no questions, usually within the same business day. Google Play also handles refunds through your account settings if you would rather go that route.
The free tier is free, so there is nothing to refund there — but if you have feedback on what made the free tier not enough for you, that email is the one to send.
Still curious? hello@velorynlabs.com · we answer within a day.
Envigo is free to install. You can save as many words as you like, forever. If you want more than a handful of reviews a day, a small monthly pack covers it.
For adults 18+. Free forever, optional Plus pack.