Our story

Chika With Me started with a blank stare in a Cebu City market — and a growing suspicion that the little robot voice in my phone was quietly sabotaging me.

A one-way ticket to Cebu

A few years ago I flew into Cebu City as an English speaker with a backpack, a loose plan, and absolutely no Bisaya. I came for a short trip and stayed far longer than I meant to. It was the people that did it — the easy warmth, the humour, the way strangers at a carinderia would wave you over like you were already a regular. I didn't want to be the tourist who points at the menu and smiles. I wanted to actually talk to people.

The robot voice nobody understood

So I did what everyone does: I opened Google Translate. I'd type a phrase, tap the little speaker, and repeat whatever the AI voice gave me. In my head I sounded ready. Out loud, in the real world, I got tilted heads and polite, confused smiles.

The flat, machine pronunciation flattened the rhythm and stress that make Bisaya Bisaya. I'd say what I thought was "thank you" or try to order, and people genuinely couldn't tell what I meant. I wasn't learning to speak like a person from Cebu — I was learning to speak like a phone. The harder I leaned on the AI voice, the more I was practising mistakes.

And when I went looking for something better, there was almost nothing. Bisaya (Cebuano) is spoken by more than 20 million people across the Visayas and Mindanao — yet the language-learning world barely builds for it. The apps that do exist mostly teach Tagalog, and nearly all of them lean on the same robotic text-to-speech that got me into trouble in the first place.

Partnering with a native speaker

Through a friend I met Rhea, a Cebuana born and raised in the city, who loved her language and bristled at how badly the apps mangled it. We started ridiculously simply: she'd record words and phrases the way they're actually said, and I'd learn from her instead of from the robot. Within days, something changed — people understood me. Market vendors laughed with me. Conversations that used to stall suddenly kept going.

That was the whole idea, really: what if every word came from a real native voice, checked by hand, instead of a synthetic one that's confidently wrong? What if learning Bisaya felt like being taught by a patient friend, not a machine?

Chika With Me

We built the tool I wished I'd had on day one. Every word and phrase in Chika With Me is recorded by a native Cebuano speaker and hand proof-checked — no text-to-speech, ever. It's conversation-first, built for your phone, and free to use, because connecting with people shouldn't sit behind a paywall.

It's for travellers finding their feet in the Visayas, for partners of Bisaya speakers who want to win over the family, for Filipinos reconnecting with the language they grew up around, and for anyone who simply loves the feeling of being understood in someone else's tongue.

"Chika" means to chat, to talk story. That's all we really want for you — to chat with people, not at them.

— The Chika With Me team, Cebu & beyond