An idea from 2018, finally within reach.

In 2018 I was doing my masters at UNSW in Sydney, taking computer-science and machine-learning courses, and quietly wrestling with a problem I'd had my whole life: I wanted to keep up my languages, but I could never find the motivation to study them. Textbooks, apps, flashcards — I'd start, and stop.

Then it clicked. When you read, you don't need motivation. A good story does the work: you turn the next page because you have to know what happens — and, almost without noticing, you pick up words in context. What if a book could quietly translate only the words you didn't know yet, and step back as you learned? I built a rough prototype for it and called it Monkey Books.

Life, though, had other plans. I had two young kids and had just arrived in Australia, and I needed to work. Monkey Books went into a drawer. Over the next ten years I built my career as a Senior Engineering and AI leader — at Google, Canva, and other companies — and had two more children along the way. Four kids, a lot of shipping, and the idea never quite let go of me.

What changed is the technology. The version of this I imagined in 2018 wasn't really buildable by one person — aligning real books, translating them faithfully, modelling what a reader knows word by word. Large language models changed that. Suddenly the hardest parts became possible, and I finally had the tools to build the thing I'd been carrying for a decade.

So Logia is Monkey Books, grown up: a language e-reader that turns reading real books into the most natural way to learn. It's the app I wished I'd had at UNSW — and the one I now want for my own kids.