Show HN: LearnLingo – Converse with an AI-powered language tutor

Really like the idea and works well.

Audio woule be the killer feature, I would make beginner easier or add starter/kid level, now it's still quite complicated:

"¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás? ¿Listo para practicar un poco de español sobre el tema del trabajo? ¿Hay algo en particular que te gustaría aprender o discutir?"

A little bit more guidance in type of conversation would also be great, maybe some tracks, or some maybe some scene to start with (as duolingo does with stories) so you don't have to put mental effort in. (you are in a restaurant order food, the waiter drops drink etc....)

A few little findings:

- There is a rogue pr-4 on the free tier pricing card which makes the content sit left-aligned instead of in the center of the card.

- In dark mode the clerk login / signup link at the bottom is hard to read in that dark blue color

- Upon signup and first login the initially created conversation is not selected.

Other than that it looks like a good MVP. It looks like you are using Shadcn/UI which I am a big fan of and I'd like to give a shout out to them here.

This is a neat concept and worked great for a German conversation. Adding a pronunciation/text-to-speech element would make it a lot more useful for beginners and is especially important for any tonal languages. It might also be helpful to support spaced repetition, i.e. be able to mark an AI response as useful and then be prompted to recall it later on. There might even be some clever prompt engineering to get GPT to try favoring certain words/phrases in its response based on proficiency level.

From a business standpoint, I would suggest focusing on one language, and targeting people who are learning it with the AI + courseware. One of the GitHub founders started chatterbug.com specifically to teach German, and they delivered an exceptional experience that was easily worth $100/month (including video chats with a German coach). Now they've taken that successful model and expanded to other languages. If I could get the same conversation going with an AI, that's great, but the real secret sauce to any online learning play is the content.

The image in the main page doesn't inspire all that confidence... as it gets bits of Italian wrong:

- The chatbot ("Bianca") starts off with "grazie per chiedere!" which is a literal translation of "thanks for asking!" but not how you would say that in Italian. E.g. Google translating "thanks for asking!" to Italian gets it right at "grazie per avermelo chiesto!", which literally would be "thanks for having asked that!". Though really most often in Italian you'd just say "grazie!", for "thanks!".

- "voi siete" as plural or formal is not wrong but... weird. Using second person plural for formal form (which is how you'd do that in French), in Italian is quite rare. Currently it's only used in some regions or in very formal bureaucratic lingo. In most circumstances, you would say "lei è" (i.e. same as third person singular, feminine) - this has been the standard for a long time, Mussolini fought it back to introduce the "voi siete" again (which I guess it's why it's still there in formal lingo, which hasn't changed much since Fascism), but well, for most people that experiment ended 80 years ago?

- When the user asks "E "voi siete", "noi siamo", corretto?" (which is not great Italian, but that's fine, the user isn't supposed to be fluent; though it's weird to ask literally something which the bot stated exactly the line above), somehow the bot gets overly sheepish and apologises for an error where there was none, just to repeat the very same thing it said (because, well, indeed it was already correct).

Great work, I am currently building something similar.

https://www.openlang.ai (very rough MVP, please try it on desktop)

It has an AI tutor also like yours, but the main function is to learn via podcasts and YouTube using the language showing technique.

Based on my own experience learning a language, once you reach an intermediate level you usually hit a plateau, and you need to watch and listen to as much content as possible to improve.

The key is to keep your motivation high, and you do that by using content you actually care about. Learning a language shouldn't be something tedious but something you look forward to.