How it's made

AI disclosure

Geeks in Kyoto is AI-generated content that's directed, cast, and reviewed by a human. All the voices that you hear and nearly all the text are generated by Google Gemini models. Our characters are fictional and the voice casting is by general attributes like "an older, educated man" with no likenesses or voice cloning.

From time to time the course will volunteer facts like a location, a train itinerary, or a hiking route. We try to make these accurate and grounded in reality, but please don't rely on them.

The process

Geeks in Kyoto is born of the frustration of studying for years and being unable to catch natural Japanese at nomikai. That's what the course exists to fix.

I write the scenarios in the case of longer stories, or the briefs for shorter lessons. I set the tone of what to teach, what to voice and how to cast it, and what register of Japanese to use in each situation (casual, polite, or a mix). My personal anecdotes from travelling in Japan over 20 years are woven into the stories.

Claude AI does the site coding, expands a scenario into beat-by-beat who-did-what, and together we adjust details of the casting or the brief. Gemini AI then generates the Japanese text as well as the voices.

Both Claude and Gemini produce natural Japanese, so potential errors are rarely in the grammar. You can try this in the tutor — enter some imperfect Japanese and see the corrections it produces.

For me as author and editor the kinds of mistakes to catch are elsewhere: AI 'hallucinations' where the model goes off-script, continuity errors, voicing or explaining the wrong reading of a word, or lack of situational and emotional grounding in the dialogues.

To guard against these, first we automatically transcribe the audio content and check that it matches the script — that's necessary as the current state of AI makes unpredictable mistakes. Claude AI does a critical review of the Japanese to spot mistakes, and I listen to the whole course to see if it feels right, appropriate, and logically together.

We haven't yet commissioned a native review. We're building in public. If you do find something wrong, linguistically or otherwise, please report it with the 'Report AI content' button and we'll correct it.

Who's making this

Pavlos Papageorgiou under the company Geeks in Cities Ltd, registered in Scotland (SC885112). Our aim is to bring effective immersion learning to difficult languages.

I'm the founder, the learner, and the target customer. I've travelled to Japan for over 20 years while working in tech and I'm building the course I wish had existed for expats and frequent visitors. I'm not a teacher and don't claim to be — my own Japanese was low-mid when I started building this, and now it's both refreshed and climbing fast, which I take as evidence that the approach works.

Japanese is currently our only focus. What might come next, no promises.