Glossa

Glossa is a mixed-reality interactive story and language learning app. Glossa puts you inside a noir detective story and asks you to learn by doing, scanning the real world around you and translating what you find.

How it works

Glossa sessions are designed to fit into a daily routine. Each session takes around five minutes, making a full case completable across a month. Between sessions, you can return to your personal evidence log at any time to review and practice the vocabulary you've collected, reinforcing what you've learned at your own pace.

The noir audio experience is built around Marlowe's voice, scripted, produced, and performed to pull you into the world of the case from the first session.

There are no lives to lose, no streaks to maintain, no penalty for taking a day off. Glossa respects your time and trusts you to come back because the story is worth coming back to.

You play a rookie detective working international cases alongside Lieutenant Marlowe, a world-weary investigator based at the precinct back home. Marlowe can see through your camera but can't read the labels and the evidence in front of you. Your job is to translate everything for him.

Across daily sessions, Marlowe briefs you on the case, points you toward what matters, and asks you to scan your environment. Using your camera, you identify objects and colors, and learn them either French, Spanish or Italian, practicing your chosen language. What you find feeds the investigation. What you learn stays with you.

The stories

Each case unfolds over fourteen daily sessions, building a complete noir mystery with suspects, red herrings, and a twist you won't see coming. Six interconnected cases per language take you deeper into a world where the stories begin to overlap, characters reappear, and the mysteries grow larger than any single investigation. Cases are set across Europe, in the galleries of Paris, the restaurants of Lyon, the port of Marseille, the streets of Barcelona, the piazzas of Naples. Each location brings its own cultural texture, its own cast of characters, and its own crime. The cases involve art fraud, inheritance theft, smuggling operations, political corruption, and identity crimes. The villain is never who you expect.

The learning

Glossa teaches French, Italian, and Spanish through a structured vocabulary progression across six cases per language. Early cases focus on colors and everyday nouns. Later cases introduce more complex vocabulary in context. Because you're scanning real objects in your actual environment using AR camera vision, the words you learn are anchored to things you've genuinely seen and touched, not abstract illustrations on a screen.

Three languages. Eighteen cases. One detective.

Whether you're a complete beginner or building confidence in a language you've already started, Glossa meets you where you are. The cases scale in complexity, the vocabulary builds systematically, and the stories reward you for paying attention across every language and every case.

The evidence is out there. You just need to know how to read it.