Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI

From what I read (on /r/gamedesign, /r/proceduralgeneration and Gamasutra) it's about control.

The AAA studies leave nothing to chance when it is about the game play. Once "AI" speech comes to a level where the NPC will only answer with pre-sanctioned content they might jump onto the band wagon ... but seeing that it is very much possible to generate porn with "censored" stable diffusion ... we won't see "free" AIs in games any time soon.

> AIs simply do not sound like people. They can fool me for a little while, but eventually you realize it's just a bot.

Why would a language learner be concerned about that? If I thought it was a real person, I'd become alarmed, because that's not what it was presented to me as.

> You take whatever biases the AI has, and encode it into a living, breathing person.

Biases towards certain adjectives? I don't even understand this comment. It could lead you into speaking weird Spanish if it speaks weird Spanish, but I imagine that would be something they were trying to improve if they noticed it. And growing up in a weird place or having a weird family could also result in you speaking weird Spanish. You still speak Spanish, which is what language learners are looking for, and if you want to sound like a particular class of Spanish speaker, you would hang out with them and consume their media.

I mean, my own English is pretty bad in my opinion, but it's a dream level for an aspiring language learner. Practicing their English with me would be useful, even if my speaking is somehow "biased." Are you telling me that language practice with an AI is worthless, or even a sin?

I really don't understand a bit of this comment. So much so that I'm suspicious that it was generated by a model.

As someone who is studying Japanese intensely with a tutor this is absolutely perfect for me! Being able to do some speaking and listening practice instantly at any time is exactly what I need!

A few feature requests:

- save conversations and come back to them

- history of past conversations

- auto speak the sentence

- larger buttons particularly for the microphone

I tried out Hungarian — I speak it well but have an accent — and it got some parts wrong in the transcription that a human speaker would definitely understand. A second try was better but not quite 100% and I do worry about edge cases with languages that might have less training data or less precise classification. Also for Hungarian the response was a bit weird, though on topic.

I was using Google (via some speech to text notebook web app) to practice Thai pronunciation and had the opposite problem, where the machine understood when I’m pretty sure my pronunciation was bad enough an average Thai would not understand me.

That said, I would absolutely pay for something like this if it covered the language I’m trying to learn, even if imperfectly. And at least for beginners, forcing you to speak plainly is not necessarily a bad thing.

Any plans for pricing? Subscription or by use or…?

Sounds like an opportunity to build a business?