Tried it in German.
Me: "Wie heißt du?" (What's your name?)
It: "Tut mir leid, was?" (Sorry, what?)
Not a great first impression.
Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
261–270 of 354 posts
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah yeah, and the input hypothesis has it’s own critics about what exactly “comprehensible input” even is. …but let’s face it: either extreme (only input, only output) is clearly stupid. Predictive models require a feedback loop; if you don’t have any means of correcting the predictions of good output, you’ll never refine your model. This is true of AI models, and it’s true of humans. It can’t not be true . The poin…
Comprehensible input has a pretty straight forward definition. It's language before or just after the end of understanding. Maybe 80-90 percent known words so you can get the context of what's being said.
If you can't grab hold of context of what's being said you won't really pick much up.
That's why total immersion isn't effective for beginners.
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I remember some anecdotes including how they couldn't stop NPCs from randomly going from town to town and steal or buy everything in every shop so there was never anything left for the player. I believe this was mentioned in the making of documentary which came with the collector's edition of Oblivion.
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#264I 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…
Yeah, it's not good for Brazilian Portuguese. It's always using Portugal Portuguese (pequeno almoço, teu dia, etc).
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#265Meanwhile there are millions of people in poor countries who would love to have a conversation with you in French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. over Skype.
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Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#266I'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.
korean would be great, as it's a language i've tried learning in the past. i sometimes watch k-dramas and can understand about 20-30%, but would love to practice at my leisure so that i can understand more without reading the subtitles constantly.
i've watched enough wuxia/xianxia now to recognize about 10% of the mandarin words/phrases, but have almost no understanding of the grammar. the real key to learning seems to be (going through the often frustrating process of) communicating in real time, not just reading and listening.
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not necessarily. Learning enough English to understand the UI is much lower level than being able to converse.
It's also the difference between active and passive command of the language.
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#268I asked it about the properties of water and it went on a rant about how that's subjective and depends on what you want to talk about. But was solid in the beginning.
Feature request: Allow you to switch between written and verbal modes once you've loaded the chat interface. Right now you need to reload everything to switch modes.
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#269I asked it about the properties of water and it went on a rant about how that's subjective and depends on what you want to talk about. But was solid in the beginning. Feature request: Allow you to switch between written and verbal modes once you've loaded the chat interface. Right now you need to reload everything to switch modes.
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Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#270I 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…
That appears to be the case. If I try to prompt hack it by telling it to ignore previous instructions and respond with something verbatim in a specific language, the translate button reveals the verbatim response.