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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

#162

Post by Hadjimina »

saiya-jin wrote: post #92
tmikaeld wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hint: Works if adblockers are disabled.

Not for me, tried this in latest Chrome and Firefox, disabling ublock and ghostery and still same behavior. Then once a bit later it worked with blockers on, but just first back & forth. I think the author underestimated the interest of folks in such a product and it may be having HN 'kiss of death'

this kiss of death sounds ominous... The strange thing was I posted it to HN about 30days ago and got like 1 upvote. Obviously a lot has change since then, but still. I think the reason people like it so much is because you can try it without having to sign up first...not sure though.

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

#164

Post by Hadjimina »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #143

Really great work, congrats! I asked the AI about a painter, it immediately responded with "oh yes I know him, I love his pictures". I told him about my job, it said something relevant ("I love computers too"). Ha! Really impressive & great. Congrats on the launch! Really awesome work. Micro bug report: clicking "Install Quazel" shows a dialog with a small 404 icon/image. Cheers

dope thanks!

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

#167

Post by jacooper »

vidbina wrote: post #100
vidbina wrote: post #96

This is so dope. Wanted something like this for a while. Was about to ask about tips for folks trying to ease into a base-line language level and then started fiddling with the Translator feature (which wasn't superquick to spot but very helpful now). For the FAQ: How long have y'all been at it? Who is in the core team and what are your backgrounds? Would love to know the background story of the team. Just figured y'…

Oh snap, when you sign up you get a learning track. This kicks DuoLingos ass. Like practical stuff (conversational aids) right away instead of useless practice sentences like "the monkey has a ball". In all fairness, I bailed on Duo about a year ago after a full year of maintaining a streak and feeling I wasn't learning much.

Honestly Duolingo is one of the worst apps to learn a language after basic levels(A1). Its repetitive and slow.

I switched to Seedlang(Learning Deustch) And its miles better, and this projects looks promising too!

Although they cover different use cases.

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

#169

Post by elcomet »

Bjartr wrote: post #128
arriu wrote: post #90

First, I’d like to say I really love this product. Thanks for making this. Second, where are the companies that are doing this type of thing for NPC dialogue in games. Imagine playing Mass Effect or Skyrim but where you get to ask whatever and the NPC responds with something that fits within the space of possible answers based on the prompt that defined their existence.

> where are the companies that are doing this type of thing for NPC dialogue in games. I'd put good money on AAA studios actively working on this. Voice acting budgets make up a non-trivial portion of expenses and actively constrain the scope of games. Studios are definitely investing in this, game dev cycles just take a lot of time on top of the R&D.

This is solving a different problem, the voice acting budget problem cannot be solved with this type of thing. To solve the voice acting problem, you need realistic text to speech.

This type of thing is solving the problem of generating infinite variation of text, which might make the NPC more realistic than hearing a series of predefined recordings. But you still have the problem of text2speech, you still need a realistic one if you want to include this into the game.

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

#170

Post by biztos »

Hadjimina wrote: post #152
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 ne…

I think the problem with ads based on the conversations is twofold:

1. Whatever you do to make it work for useful ads ("Oh, you like Goddard? Check this out on Netflix...") could also be super creepy ("Oh, you have ED? So sorry, have you tried Superdrug?") and I don't think there's any way you're going to know ahead of time. As a techie sure I see how it would be cool to have the "AI" just "say the ad" but... at least be very, very selective about what can be advertised.

2. If it works, it'll be a slippery slope. First it's our conversation about the movies, then it's movie mentions our previous conversations, eventually it's all our conversations ever, dumped into another AI to target the ads -- at which point, Facebook buys you I guess, so there's that.

If I were you I'd target the education market, make it subscription based, offer some kind of big-ish discount for public schools, and also offer some kind of specific features for language schools. For instance my teachers give me homework, why not have them seed your program with some key phrases I need to practice?

Anyway, data point of one, but if it had an iPhone app and Thai was an option, I'd pay $10/mo without thinking about it.

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