Live data from Hacker News

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

talk.quazel.com

251–260 of 354 posts

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

#251
post #78

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…

This is a common misconception. It probably does not match your and others' experience simply because it is conventional wisdom, and most people are taught to do this. But just because most people do something a certain way does not make it the most efficient way. There are a number of reasons why you would want to focus on input early on. For starters, with very little exposure to a language, you have very little id…

Ok, Krashen is interesting, and maybe talking more often is good for learning languages only because it gets you to receive correct and comprehensible input from the language

I'm unconvinced to be honest, as pretty much everything else that human learn is made better by practice, but I'm not a linguist.

I still think that proposing to start learning a language by spending 15000 hours (or 1500, or 150) listening to it, instead of trying to practice early on is a very inefficient way to learn a language, compared to pretty much anything

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded, I want to speak openly without fear of judgement first with the AI so when I do speak to real people I'm much more confident. I know people who are confident/shameless (a positive trait in this case) who don't mind making mistakes when speaking to real people but that's not me. My only concern is how "correct" the tool or the AI is.

You should work on your ability to act/speak in spite of the fear of making mistakes more than your skill. It is a fundamentally important property of society. We should not be afraid to even speak. Everyone has a different reality, mistakes are often highly relative. Richness of culture (and lack of political tyranny) comes from this interaction and lack of it is almost always bad.

To clarify, when I meant speak, I meant speak in a language that I have just started to learn.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahah I have a super silly response for this one: It's simply because we have not gotten around to translate the UI and everything into other languages besides english. That's why we simple assume people know english, since they need to be able to know at least some english to use it. But it's high on our to-do list.

I think you misunderstood what they're missing: the ability to converse and practise English, given it's a foreign language for some people.

So then the UI would need to be in their non-English language, which is what they are saying.

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

#255
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…

Please please paid subscription instead of ads

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

#256
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.

Absolutely. Would also be great to allow the user to select the conversation level in the event the AI doesn’t detect the desired one or one wants to try to converse at a more difficult or less difficult level for practice.

Some languages have well defined language levels for foreigners learning the language, such as HSK levels for Chinese. Would be cool to leverage that somehow.

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

#257
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'…

Hi, so most of us are based in Zurich, but the project originally started while I was writing my master's thesis at UC Berkeley. Concreteley we are: Philipp (that's me, technical, https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmhadjimina/ ) David (technical, https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-niederberger-aba7a7177/ ) Sam (biz-wiz, https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-bissegger/ ) and Gurnek (biz-wiz, https://www.linkedin.com/in/gurneksi…

Kudos. Great stuff.

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

#259

Cool!(but yeah english is really important!!) which models do you use for speech recognition and text generation?

Yup english is top of at the top of the to-do list. We use some APIs from a few different big players. One that I want to highligh which is waayy better than the rest is Microsoft speech to text, which not only recognized what you say but can also do punctuation and capitalization. Instead of "do you like to eat pizza" which is what google speech to text would give you, microsoft recognizes it as "Do you like to eat…

have you tried the new whisper model from openai?

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

#260
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'…

Hi, so most of us are based in Zurich, but the project originally started while I was writing my master's thesis at UC Berkeley. Concreteley we are: Philipp (that's me, technical, https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmhadjimina/ ) David (technical, https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-niederberger-aba7a7177/ ) Sam (biz-wiz, https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-bissegger/ ) and Gurnek (biz-wiz, https://www.linkedin.com/in/gurneksi…

Nice! All the best to y'all. I can already see y'all killing it in YC BTW so pls apply. DISCLAIMER: I'm not an investor, so what do I know. Just a fanboy atm!
Post reply on HN