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Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking

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Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking

#51

Post by sebzim4500 »

GolDDranks wrote: post #44

This is a very promising platform. However, it misses some very crucial things about learning languages. Here goes: Learning languages is mostly about getting tons of input. I tried using this for a few minutes, but all the input I got was some lines of text. Also: People say that learners don't get as much chances to output as they would like. That isn't mostly true. And even farther from the truth is to say that ou…

I'm with you as far as input goes, but I don't understand this at all:

>Also: People say that learners don't get as much chances to output as they would like. That isn't mostly true. And even farther from the truth is to say that outputting more would lead to better language acquisition.

Isn't the only way (for most people) to actually learn a language to speak it as much as possible?

Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking

#52

Post by willsmith72 »

tinyhouse wrote: post #21

Really nice! I tried Russian. A few comments. (Also please add Hebrew and Arabic) - The level was too high for me and I wasn't sure how to ask the teacher to ask me something simpler. She did say something about talking slower but my problem was with not understanding specific words. (OK, I see now that the text can be translated so that should help) 2. The suggestions assume you can read the langue but often it's no…

yep if you could find a way to engage kids and keep them talking, even for ~5 minutes, this would be such a huge win for parents encouraging language-learning

Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking

#53

Post by fabiensnauwaert »

tinyhouse wrote: post #21

Really nice! I tried Russian. A few comments. (Also please add Hebrew and Arabic) - The level was too high for me and I wasn't sure how to ask the teacher to ask me something simpler. She did say something about talking slower but my problem was with not understanding specific words. (OK, I see now that the text can be translated so that should help) 2. The suggestions assume you can read the langue but often it's no…

Hey! Thank you for taking the time!

1. Wanna go full-in on customization. Right now you can customize by telling the teacher what you want to talk about, but I can imagine in the near future the AI figuring where you stand and adapting as you go along. Matter of (coding) time.

2. You're right. I will add translations and audio to the suggestions. Something more urgent always came up but your feedback helps prioritize this.

3. Could you expand on this? Do you mean in terms of waiting for the answer? I've experience slowdowns when OpenAI is over capacity but generally it works well. Do you mind sharing where you used it from (country)?

4. Thank you, this is encouraging.

Super excited about all this!

Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking

#54

Post by fabiensnauwaert »

spaceprogrammer wrote: post #10

Amazing! Great Site. would love it if you add Turkish

Thank you! Turkish (along with Japanese and Chinese) has been on my mind for a while. If I know people will use it, I'll add it. Will try to add Turkish within 24 hours.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking

#55

Post by millgrove »

Have you thought about making more structured objectives? Shameless plug: I built a simple French/Spanish chat app and the #1 piece of feedback I got was that it's a bit aimless without any objectives.

I built out ~20 scenarios that would give users objectives like buying train tickets or ordering coffee. Now that's the most used part of the app (not the generic chat bot). As far as ads go, App Store ads are not bad and can't be ad-blocked, so that's an option.

Would love feedback! https://apps.apple.com/app/verbius-ai-language-learning/id64...

Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking

#56

Post by fabiensnauwaert »

jjallen wrote: post #2

Very cool can’t wait to try it. I’m curious about offering Bosnian which basically no language apps do. Was it just easy to offer or is there more of a connection. My wife is Bosnian and I have learned some over the years.

I added Bosnian because of a trip I took a couple of months ago (big on using my own product to learn more languages – "eat your own dog food" kinda way .)

How do you feel about your pronunciation of Bosnian? Could you get your wife to try it? How

The elephant in the room with language education is that it's tough to learn clear pronunciation even though it's super useful. Things get a bit messed up with speech recognition:

1. Speech recognition is designed to understand no matter what (which is kinda stupid – in natural language when things are incomprehensible [because of noise, lack of context, mispronunciation, or whatever we just ASK people to repeat]

2. Speech recognition is trained on native speakers most of the time. But it would make sense to do two opposite things: 1) train it on non-native speakers as well (to improve performance), things are getting there… 2) train it to correct non-native speakers (some projects in that direction too, mostly for English.)

I'll add my own layer of checks to handle such cases. So that when speech recognition goes wrong (as it inevitably will – with HIGH variability between different contexts and speakers) the teacher does not get off track because of it.

Sorry this got so long!

Thank you for sharing your feedback :)

Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking

#58

Post by fabiensnauwaert »

dangwhy wrote: post #41

This is amazing. I tried coffeshop with Spanish and worked great. I wouldnt mind paying subscriptions for this like i do for duolingo. Congrats!

Thank you! A lot of posts seem to be focused on when things go wrong (which I DO need to hear of course), so it's good to get a simple reminder like this one.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking

#59

Post by fabiensnauwaert »

ihm wrote: post #49

Mexican Spanish didn't work at all. It asked me "Como te llamas" and I replied, "Me llamo Isaac", which got speech-recognized into some French sentence. I tried again saying "Si, me llamo Isaac" and it got recognized as some gibberish like "C. Mi anno E Sack" or something.

Did you try disabling multilingual speech recognition?

Speech recognition is multilingual by default, which means you can ask a question in any language. The tradeoff is that your pronunciation may be misunderstood at times.

e.g. English spoken in a thick French accent may be misinterpreted as French.

If you turn off multilingual speech recognition you won't have such issue. Maybe I should have made it the default?

A few thoughts:

- It means you can use it to improve your accent. The clearer you get, the better the transcription. But this may not be everyone's use case. (And this is something to build on.) - I tried to keep things simple without asking users for details to get started. But I will start asking for the user's native and target language, then I'll add a layer to detect when things go wrong to avoid experiences like the one you've just had.

Thank you for sharing.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking

#60

Post by personjerry »

ozzeruk wrote: post #23

Okay, 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…

There is a setting in the menu for "multilingual" transcription, if you turn that off it gets better.
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