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

gliglish.com

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

#91

Post by rokkitmensch »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #38

Is 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 pro…

> my response synthesis skill is severely under-developed

A million times this. I can read at pretty much an 18 year old level, but i can barely synthesize at a 14 year old level, and this is where i need pushing.

> speech to text shouldn't generate text which is outside of the practice language

Another take: the speech recognition is too good with my sloppy banlieu french. I need this to spot my mistakes and make me practice correcting myself. I said "chuis something-or-other" and it correctly parsed my intention to say "je suis", but i want that pointed out to me. also my wife corrected me from the other room on "toi" vs "tu" and Giglish just glossed over the mistake.

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

#92

Post by rokkitmensch »

millgrove wrote: post #55

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…

I'll second this. Consider writing prompts for the LLM that push it towards asking questions of the user, evaluating their responses, and offering corrections and asking them to repeat themselves.

This is an interesting prompting problem, let me know if you want to collaborate. I'm not in the language space, but would gladly riff with you on the topic to improve Giglish and improve my own thinking on the topic.

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

#93

Post by rokkitmensch »

wydengyre wrote: post #22

Nice work, Fabien! I recently released my own tool for language learners, bitextual[1]. I announced it on the language learning subreddit[2]. This kind of thing is allowed there, and it led to some useful feedback. [1] https://bitextual.net [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/

I have wanted this for years. Kudos.

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

#96

Post by DoryMinh »

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…

this is paradoxical. A native speaker struggles to understand non-native one. Why do we expect AI to understand non-native speech?

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

#97

Post by DoryMinh »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #51
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?

nope, unfortunately it isn't. Learners needs tons of comprehensible input before they actually produce anything.

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

#98

Post by willsmith72 »

fabiensnauwaert wrote: post #72
willsmith72 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh I disagree. It's not perfect, but that's just about expectation management. Users don't expect voice-to-text to be perfect - in fact, the past 10 years shitty experiences have been the norm. I think it depends on the level of mistakes the transcribing makes, but that's only going to improve with time with advances in AI and as the product evolves (using the context of the conversation like you say would be a great…

And, well… "glass half-empty or glass half-full?" Speech recognition is far from perfect but even then it's incredibly useful. It CAN be infuriating (or downright hilarious). Hell, it's infuriating when occasionally a (human!) waiter switches to English after I mangled a sound in Hungarian, even though I'm C1/advanced in the language. Problem or opportunity? Like someone else pointed out, the limitations of speech-to…

Yep exactly right. Awesome product you're building, I'm sure so many people can get value out of this

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

#99

Post by runjake »

In your Python course, I was able to run os.listdir() arbitrarily and explore your container and mounts and create files in /var/tmp.

I didn't try writing elsewhere or getting destructive, but one can imagine. I did not run a while true to exhaust your disk space, but somebody else could.

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

#100

Post by lisasays »

fabiensnauwaert wrote: post #86
lisasays wrote: post #83

So here's some more balanced feedback, if you will (playing with a language I know quite well already): On the positive side: the bot itself has excellent voice quality (it still sounds bot-like -- but people expect that) and makes very few pronunciation mistakes (I only noticed one). Its vocal recognition is, I would say ... not great, but good enough (it recognizes well enough if I say simple, standard things, but…

Hey! Thanks for the balanced feedback, all totally valid. (1) I'm self-directed in my learning and always knew what I wanted my teachers to do, but everyone's different. Definitely going to add more choice of content (and not just roleplay.) I have a very structured and successful program to learn English and will try to adapt what works well in it to Gliglish. (2) You're right! The speech recognition and LLM layers…

Just talking to oneself in the mirror or journaling in a foreign language is already super productive and this is it… on steroids.

I agree that a working pronunciation "coach" could be highly useful. And a great distinguishing feature for the app, if done right. However right now the app objectively fails in that category. It is simply unable to tell me when I'm not saying things properly.

(Which I hope you will take positively. The main thing is -- you're doing it, putting it out there. Best of luck).

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