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

talk.quazel.com

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

#151

Post by nemetroid »

bobajeff wrote: post #106
Majestic121 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like an extremely inefficient way of learning a language, and does not match at all my experience nor the experience of the people I know fluent in multiple languages, and it seems to go straight against a common advice which is to speak and practice early and often, as 'producing' language is much more efficient to learn it than 'consuming' it. What makes you think 15000 hours of listening would improve a…

I was guessing about about 15,000 hours I just think it has to be a lot time. I'm sure speaking helps most people who study languages simply by exposing them to more input more frequently then they would otherwise be exposed to. I just don't think it is as efficient as focusing on listening first. It will lead to having an accent, grammer issues and pauses to think about how to say things. That being said good luck f…

I think there's some merit to your argument, that there's some minimal level of understanding that's required before speaking becomes meaningful, but that your time estimate is off by two orders of magnitude.

Working in Sweden, where tech companies speak English internally, I've been able to follow the language learning journeys of quite a few people (including some using the strategy "don't bother"), and the people who end up the best speakers (with regard to accent, grammar and vocabulary) are invariably those who try to speak the language as much as possible as early as possible.

Yes, they will have a strong accent in the beginning, but it goes away with time (though accents rarely disappear entirely). The native English speakers who've lived in the country for twenty years without speaking much Swedish daily still have strong accents.

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

#152

Post by Hadjimina »

biztos wrote: post #127

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 t…

we do have some plans but nothing finalised yet. We actually removed the stripe implementation because we want to publish it as a PWA on appstores. For pricing we would probably go the subscription route. An other idea we had was for an ad-based service (I also hate ads so give me a sec to explain): When you talk to a friend about movies you are currently watching, the might recommend a good movie they just saw on netflix. Now in our case we could have recommendations like that but they would be ads.

Obviously you don't want to be spammed by ads in every conversations and it's going to be tricky how they come across. Do you think something like that would be greepy or ok? Or would you say it's better to have it a premium subscription based service? We are trying to figure this stuff out ourselves atm...

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

#154

Post by DoryMinh »

bilsbie wrote: post #34

Here’s what I think would be a killer feature. Have it use AI to adapt the conversation level to the level of learner. Smaller words, repetition, slower. If you notice this is how adults talk to babies and children to help them learn the language.

I'd agree but it depends on what AI engine that he uses to generate the conversation

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

#155

Post by Hadjimina »

panda_2134 wrote: post #126
swyx wrote: post #102

am rusty chinese speaker. randomly assigned to converse on Furniture & Locations. --- Quazel: 告诉我吧!你是如何安排你的家具的？ Me (in halting, broken chinese): 窗户旁边有一个沙发，中间是电视和桌子。我的工作就是在这里. Quazel: 所以你的沙发是面向窗户的？那真的很好。我敢打赌，这样你会得到很多自然光。沙发后面是什么呢？ translated Quazel: How do you arrange your furniture? Me: There is a couch next to the window, with a TV and table in the middle. This is where I work. Quazel: So you have your couch facing t…

Native Chinese speaker here. While Quazel has shown ability in understanding the context, its Chinese is not as authentic as that of a real teacher. Grammatically correct, but sounds weird. (for example, the phrase "I bet" is rarely used in Chinese) Maybe the weirdness is an innate characteristic of machine translation, so I'm not being too harsh here. But IMO it cannot take the place of a human teacher (at least now…

Yeah some languages work better than others...keep in mind this is the earliest usable version. Will definelty keep that in mind

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

#156

Post by randcraw »

bilsbie wrote: post #34

Here’s what I think would be a killer feature. Have it use AI to adapt the conversation level to the level of learner. Smaller words, repetition, slower. If you notice this is how adults talk to babies and children to help them learn the language.

There are many possible knobs on such a tool that could be wonderfully useful. I'd love to press a button that provides critical feedback: marking for errors or suggesting improvements for style (grammar, better word choice, useful idioms, etc).

It'd also be great if my sentence was scored for 'natural-ness' -- how close was it to native speech? If this could be done regionally, that'd be better still (e.g. Spanish as spoken in Spain vs Mexico vs Argentina, etc).

I'd also love to know what age level am I speaking at. A child? A teen? An adult? A more educated person? A professional author? Am I being ambiguous? Too direct?

What is the tone I am using? Friendly? Demanding? Too formal? Culturally clueless? Improper to someone older or to the opposite sex?

In fact, these same feedbacks could be really valuable even in your own native language. Learning how to communicate more clearly, precisely, positively, professionally, respectfully, literately, or even in a different style would be great practice to improve a person's basic communication skills in any language.

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

#157

Post by bsaul »

andrepd wrote: post #9

With the current state of AI text generation, isn't this a recipe for disaster? By talking to a chatbot while learning a language you are liable to pick up whatever (vast) errors and mistakes the bot makes.

IMHO, better practice with mistakes, then fix them later once you talk to native speakers, than not practice at all.

For kickstarting a language practice, this site honestly seems ideal..

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

#158

Post by nemetroid »

bongobingo1 wrote: post #109
allisdust wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if it is a movie or a tv series. Best (enjoyable) way would always be to watch something you like in a language you want to learn with subtitles for a longer term. Things like binge watching won't work though because the brain gets tired and tunes out.

IMO subtitles are not that effective as you brain just stays in read-mode and you don't actually process any of the spoken language. When most languages grammar are not 1:1, so hearing "house red is mine" but reading "my house is red" isn't helpful - more true with real sentences that tend to have more than 4 words in them. Language listening skills require a fair amount of attention and focus. Though I do think ther…

I think the person you're replying to means subtitles in the target language.

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

#159

Post by Quazel_S »

madmod wrote: post #125

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

Thank you for your positive feedback! We're currently working on implementing the features you mentioned!

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

#160

Post by jinto36 »

Hi, I'm just wondering what the text-to-speech and speech-to-text for Japanese is based on? It works pretty well, and speech-to-text in a browser is not something I thought would be practical a few years ago. How much of that is being done client-side? Also like others I recognize some of the "voices" from Duolingo, so presumably there's some text-to-speech engine in common? The prompt/scene generator is amusing.
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