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

talk.quazel.com

231–240 of 354 posts

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

#231
Congrats on getting your project in front of everyone! Among many side projects I've never gotten around to start on, or past the hook up APIs stage, this concept is one of them.

I suspect that is using one of the off the shelf NLP chat bots and speech recognition, perhaps from a platform like Hugging Face, since you are allowed to chat about anything you want and have a dozen or so languages enabled. While really cool, as others have pointed out in complex responses received, I suspect it is a long way for being useful to a language learner because the user has no way of knowing if what the chatbot is saying makes any sense. For example I used keyboard entry to speak in Japanese with it. The bot said hello and asked my name. I replied with my name in katakana and the desu (I am fragment) in hiragana. The bot responded in a way that just smashed those together as my name grammatically which is incorrect.

Perhaps the language models can get so good some day one could just prompt a model to "teach me Japanese through conversation from the beginning", but for now I think it is difficult enough to make an engine for a single language pair. If one is far enough along in a language to be conversational, it is low-cost, or even free, to find an actual language exchange conversation partner.

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

#232
post #174

I'm stunned by how well this works for Japanese, the only language I think I'm good enough at to judge the AI's responses. The speech recognition is flawless as far as I can tell. The AI occasionally gets itself into a loop of repeating my question or itself, but I think this has been a problem with a lot of chatbots. The only glaring errors I've seen so far are these kinds of AI-specific issues, like forgetting cont…

If it's that good with Japanese, I'd love to see it support Korean! Keeping up conversational practice is very tough as a non-native speaking not living in Korea anymore. So having an AI that I can bother at my convenience would be amazing.

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

#234

I tried using it in Portuguese and it's cool but it seems very off, just a huge number of things that don't sound even remotely natural or idiomatic. But when I click the translate button, the English translation is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. SO... I'm highly suspecting that, behind the scenes, the "real" conversation is happening in English, and it's translating in both directions. Which is always going to…

You never hear Brazilian Portuguese with perfect grammar. If it were a Portuguese accent, it would be more realistic.

He’s talking about unnatural (non-idiomatic) language. That’s not an issue you can fix with better grammar; there are many language learners who possess good intonation and pronunciation, and natural (idiomatic) speech, but poor grammar: their idiomatic speech more than makes up for grammatical mistakes.

Source: learning languages for 10+, have met students as described above.

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

#235
post #157
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..

Eh, I tested it with a language I speak and it was almost comically bad. Grammar constructions nobody would use, mixing vocabulary from two different variants in the same sentence, etc.

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

#236
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never hear Brazilian Portuguese with perfect grammar. If it were a Portuguese accent, it would be more realistic.

He’s talking about unnatural (non-idiomatic) language. That’s not an issue you can fix with better grammar; there are many language learners who possess good intonation and pronunciation, and natural (idiomatic) speech, but poor grammar: their idiomatic speech more than makes up for grammatical mistakes. Source: learning languages for 10+, have met students as described above.

I interacted a bit with the AI and the Portuguese is fine, it's just that it conjugates, uses the proper pronouns, etc. These things a typical Brazilian does not do.

The difference between standard Portuguese and oral language in Brazil is enormous.

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

#237
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I've worked in game development (AAA and large indie games) for almost eight years and I would generally take the narratives on game subreddits with a healthy helping of salt. They're largely speculative and uninformed. Gamasutra is better, but often game journalism is full of simplifications and rough analogies. The main problem with this type of content is that it needs to be solid enough that it adds to the experi…

Do you have any sources on the development process of the Radiant AI that I could read up on?

I’ve only heard the marketing speak (“amazing!!!!”) followed by the actual product (“get X for Y at Z, 5 times”). I’ve never seen anything that explained the disconnect, aside from Todd just being a sheister.

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

#239
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leas…

well as long as you learn the language
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