I spoke "Mi Chiamo Chris" and it heard "Mi Kiamo Chris", then proceeded to tell me to spell it with a 'C' not a 'K'.. ok then.
Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
31–40 of 112 posts
Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
#32It's been working way better than I expected. Good job!
Thank you! I actually got that reaction from a few users , this is always nice to hear though. It's far from perfect though. I'll try my best!
Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
#33I wanted to try it in Hindi, but it was unavailable. Would love to play around w/ it in that language.
I love the idea though!
Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
#34It is like Quazel but, Quazel is better.
Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
#35Hey, this is cool!
Is it possible something more than the speed throttle for beginners? Could the AI use simpler language for beginners and more complex for advanced users?
Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the first of getting replaced makes sense. I think it's more about complementarity. There's not even speaking time in language classes and it's been like this for decades. (Language labs were supposed to make up for it, but I suspect they'll become AI-based… well, like most things )
> There's not even speaking time in language classes and it's been like this for decades. That's not even the only issue. I took some strictly conversational classes for a while, but the problem is that it's one teacher with 5-10 students, so most of the speaking and conversing is done with people who suck as bad as you do at the language! The thing I really liked about your site (and just some of my own practicing t…
That is true and I never really understood this 'babysitting' approach to language education (as in: language classes too often feel like they're designed to keep kids busy, while the goal should be to use the language.) Talking to a mirror would work better than a lot of language class activities I can think of.
Will try to build on this positive, thank you!
Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
#37Okay, here's some brutal feedback, please take it with your best interests at heart. I am an English native speaker who has lived in Spain for 10 years, and has become fluent. 1) These speech-to-text models are poor when it comes to non-natives. This is unfortunate as the idea you had and the product you've designed could be incredible for language learning. However - it's a bit crap - sorry - I can speak Spanish wel…
I also had difficulty getting it to understand me. Theres a couple solutions I can think of that may make this more usable:
1) Speech to text into an input field, allow the user to modify
2) I presume this is uses an LLM to generate the responses, submit the new text and give it the entire convo as context but initially ask it to "correct" the text to what would make sense in context based on similar sounding words.
Edit: Hah oh it's not too great right now at all. Tried it again and it ended up writing Cyrillic as my response despite me speaking Spanish.
Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
#38Is there a way to disable or hide the suggested responses?
I've been a Duolingo French learner for 11months and I'm adept at reading French aloud or at least well enough to have it recognized by speech to text. However, my response synthesis skill is severely under-developed - I have a difficult time choosing how to respond when spoken to. I can see the suggested responses being useful to someone practicing their pronunciation, but for what I want to improve upon, they act as a crutch.
Additionally, is text-to-speech on the roadmap? It would be nice to have a fully audio conversation, even to the extent of disabling the text output of the agent or instituting touch-to-reveal. Like a lot of language learners, I am quite a bit more adept at reading and writing than I am at speaking and listening.
Finally, a small bug(?). When I've selected a language to practice, speech to text shouldn't generate text which is outside of the practice language. I purposefully got sloppy a few times and Portuguese and Arabic were generated from my speech. I understand this isn't a deal-breaker, but it broke the immersivity of the experience for me.
Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
#39I really love the idea -- learning a new language can be pretty embarrassing, and a chatbot is a wonderful way to practice (in theory). The site worked pretty well with German! It would be helpful to be able to click on words I'm not familiar with (or have forgotten - I haven't spoken in over a decade) and get a short definition.
Thank you, this is very specific feedback and helps me prioritize what to add next. I used to have a dictionary for English but wasn't happy with the UI. I'll try to figure something that would fit just this: looking up words (via a dictionary or otherwise – translator, explanation.)
Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
#40Okay, here's some brutal feedback, please take it with your best interests at heart. I am an English native speaker who has lived in Spain for 10 years, and has become fluent. 1) These speech-to-text models are poor when it comes to non-natives. This is unfortunate as the idea you had and the product you've designed could be incredible for language learning. However - it's a bit crap - sorry - I can speak Spanish wel…
Slightly off topic, but I could imagine that what you are alluding to regarding the expectation of certain words or phrases depending on the context of the conversation could be used to improve speech-to-text models. The speech could be parsed into multiple options which can ranked by a language model with the conversation context.
Whisper takes a prompt as well, it would be a good idea to try that out.