Vietnam has seen a remarkable burst of technological innovation and artistic creativity in recent years. App and game developers integrate overseas trends and knowledge with their homegrown vision to help and entertain millions. Local artists forge ahead with bold experiments, putting the essences of old-school works into new forms.

Here are some of the Vietnamese talents who dare to dream big, and a look at the incredible work that they do.

English-learning app ELSA Speak focuses on improving pronunciation, expanding vocabulary and practising conversations. The idea for the app came from Elsa co-founder and CEO Văn Đinh Hồng Vũ, who wrestled with the language while studying and working abroad.

ELSA Speak uses an AI model built and trained by its team to break down how users pronounce words by individual syllables, providing better insight into what changes can be made while taking native accents into account.

Using a large language model for its role-playing lessons, ELSA Speak gives its users real-time responses in conversations. The sessions are then evaluated to give learners feedback on possible ways to improve.

To protect user privacy, the app’s AI is fine-tuned with anonymised data, with the recorded voice samples from conversations stored and removed per GDPR standards.

When Hanoi–based SilverAI’s co-founder Phan Sỹ Quang was tasked by his grandmother to remove strangers from her favourite photo, he dedcided to create a photo-editing tool that anyone can use.

With the nifty SnapEdit, you can remove unwanted subjects, change the colour of the sky, restore old photos and more. And it’s all thanks to the AI model built and trained by the SilverAI team, dedicated to recognising and editing subjects based on open-source images. To protect user privacy, uploaded images are encrypted and never stored on SilverAI’s servers.

This Tet, SnapEdit is also introducing new AI art templates that allow users to put themselves against festive backdrops. Making that on-theme social post or holiday greeting card just got easier.

Born in the Year of the Metal Snake, artist Wren Evans (real name: Lê Phan) has been a pioneer in the Vietnamese music scene, mixing different sounds to create his own.

After discovering bossa nova in high school, Wren went on to combine it with his longtime passion: Vietnamese-style bolero. Mixing in elements of pop, funk and hip-hop, Wren ends up with a musical fusion that is both international-sounding and yet unmistakably local. “Music is not just one thing. It can be fused with so many things to become a sub-genre, or something entirely new,” explains Wren.

A talented artist who can play multiple instruments and make his own beats, Wren often uses Logic Pro for production work, leveraging the app’s libraries of stock sounds and samples. The Mac version of Logic Pro also comes with support for the Dolby Atmos workflow, which Wren uses to create spatial audio effects.