Montville native launches texting app

A Montville native just launched an educational app designed to teach kids new words while they text their friends.

The Wonder Keyboard, “the keyboard that helps you sound smart and funny” according to its tagline, launched Friday for Apple products. The app reads what the users type in a text and provides another way for them to express themselves, using SAT-level vocabulary and other dialects.

“It lets students learn new words as they text,” said Sam Mendelson, 26, currently living in Silicon Valley in California.

Mendelson came up with the idea along with his co-founder Allan Zhang while reflecting on their past work as teachers and tutors in schools. The pair recently worked in finance at JP Morgan before quitting last summer to join an Intel Education Accelerator program, an intensive platform designed to create educational apps. There they spent six months working seven days per week, 12-plus-hour days to create the Wonder Keyboard.

“There’s a disconnect between how kids are taught and how they learn words now,” Mendelson said. “The way I learned was reading books. Reading is the best way to learn words in context. So why not bring that to texting?”

The keyboard can be equipped to offer people new words to use while sending a text.

“There’s a whole litany of words you can use (in a conversation),” Mendelson said, “But you tend to limit yourself to just a handful over time.”

For example, if someone typed “this pizza is really good,” the keyboard would offer suggestions like “delectable” or “delicious” to substitute for “good.”

The app is free to download.

“It is important to us that the educational aspects of the app always be free,” Mendelson said.

The Wonder Keyboard launched on March 4 with three “personas,” the Texan, the All-American, which is a mastery of English idioms, and the Aristocrat, which includes 1,500 SAT- and GRE-level words.

“It’s helpful to the person sending the text, but also the reader of it,” Mendelson said. “They’re reading, discovering new words and retaining what they’ve learned.”

A fourth persona, the 1980s Valley Girl, is available for a $1.99 in-app fee. Other applications include a vocabulary expander and an idioms explorer, which, for example, would give the texter the option to change “hungry” to “hungry as a horse.”

Just one week in, Wonder Keyboard is already a success. By the weekend after the Friday launch, Wonder Keyboard topped the list of Apple’s Best New Apps in the U.S. and 88 other markets.

The app stayed in the top spot through Monday and in the top 10 through its first week, which Mendelson said he was particularly proud of since apps historically tend to “freefall” off the list after a day or so.

“It’s shown tremendous growth at an unexpectedly rapid pace. And that we’re able to hold on that list is an extremely good sign,” Mendelson said. “It’s growing much faster than we expected. Much better than our last app.”

In August 2015, Mendelson and Zhang launched Words U, a similar app, but in the form of its own messaging system. Will the app was extremely well-reviewed, too few people were willing to commit to communicating through an entirely different app. So the pair went back to the drawing board and returned with a similar concept in the form of a keyboard addition to a traditional texting app.

Mendelson said the positive feedback the app has received in the week since launching is overwhelming and humbling. After hundreds of reviews, Wonder Keyboard boasts a rating of four and a half stars out of five.

“We are ecstatic that everyone likes the idea of learning new words as they type,” he said.

Mendelson said there’s much more to do with the Wonder Keyboard in the coming months, including new personas like “the CEO” and expanding the idiom generator.

Go to TypeWithWonder.com to learn more and see the app in action.

Staff Writer Michael Izzo: 973-428-6636;mizzo@GannettNJ.com