Grant Johnson was your average teenager: a kid who wanted to be a millionaire and was obsessed with the game “Among Us.” Johnson, set on combining those two concepts, decided to take up programming to hopefully replicate his favorite game but ended up falling in love with the activity and later creating a program available on the app store.
“I’m quite curious, and I really get fascinated with quite a few different things,” Johnson said. “It’s been really nice to be in the computer science space where anything that comes to mind, you can really take a stab at building it from scratch.”
Johnson, a former Wichita State student who left the university in the fall of 2022, has been able to further his programming passion through his time at Koch Industries. Recently, he’s been working on one project that takes up the majority of his time: “Chatterbox,” an app integrated with artificial intelligence that allows users to learn Spanish while keeping it convenient and “gamified.”
After eight months of work, the application was released on Sunday. There are three parts of the app according to Johnson: the memorization, the grammar and the application. There are classic memory games such as flipping cards and trivia games and activities more attuned to board game aspects like in “Scrabble.” Users are also able to utilize AI to apply what they’ve learned to real-world situations.
“(Users are) loaded in, and they have to talk to Picasso and have to ask him where he’s from and how his day is, and they have to complete the objective,” Johnson said. “It’s an incredibly gamified process where really the world is your map, and you’re traveling to these different cities by going in there and having to complete these different levels.”
Johnson said he got the idea from his own Spanish-learning journey. He started by trying out popular apps like “Duolingo” and “Babbel,” but none of them had the features he was looking for. Johnson said he found himself failing to improve and bored throughout the process.
To try and help further his education, Johnson held Spanish game nights where he and other WSU students would get together and play average board games translated into Spanish such as “Monopoly,” which not only built up his Spanish repertoire but also his business endeavors.
“I then wanted to take that aspect and turn it into an app where you can really be put in real-world situations to be able to improve,” Johnson said.
Johnson said learning Spanish helped him realize how fortunate he was growing up in the United States, and he wants to share that experience with the users of “Chatterbox.”
“I have only ever needed English, but now most of my friends and people that I have close relationship(s) to, I can now meet them in a form that I couldn’t have beforehand,” Johnson said. “They really appreciate and don’t take for granted (that) you’ve taken the time to learn their language.”
Johnson has seen massive success using TikTok to support “Chatterbox,” but he says this comes with its challenges, such as time.
“The most difficult (part) is having to balance it on top of every other part of life,” Johnson said. “Like I still am a full-time employee at Koch and work 40 hours a week. And so the last eight months, I’ve worked an average of 70 hours between the two of them and the last month I’ve worked 90 hours.”
Despite the dread of certain deadlines, Johnson said he’s fortunate to be able to do what he does for a living.
“I really love what I do,” Johnson said. “I go to work and I do what I love, and then I come home and I do what I love … The majority of it, it’s just been a blast. So I think it’s been difficult to balance it, but also it’s probably been the most fun and exciting time of my life.”
To celebrate the release of “Chatterbox,” there will be a launch party held at Shocker Sports Grill & Lanes on Saturday, Dec. 7, at 2 p.m.
“It should be a good time, certainly very excited, very nervous as well,” Johnson said. “I’ve never worked on something for as long as I have on this project, so I’m really hoping it goes well.”
