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Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor

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31–40 of 137 posts

Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor

#31

Interesting. I'm currently playing a little bit in the instructional space, it's impressive what you can get GPT to do there. I would absolutely lean into the game aspect as long as it doesn't impact the quality of the tool. People love games and it lets you tie everything into a story, which people also love. For instance, people love stardew valley and it has inspired a bunch of youngsters to become farmers, but wh…

Good point

Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor

#32

The other company in this space I've been following is Speak ( https://www.speak.com/ ). Aside from supported languages, how is Univerbal different?

To add something here. We're really focusing on the tutoring aspect and fundamentally tailoring everything to the user's progress. Speak has a couple of ideas that are similar, however many more that are vastly different.

Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor

#33
Neat app.

How do you measure linguistic progress?

>* The hard part intervenes when you try to replicate the progress tracking and tailoring of the curriculum.*

Perhaps you guys just aren't thinking about it in the right way ;) Progress tracking and measurement is significantly easier from a conceptual standpoint than you might think. I'm not just bullshitting here - I've actually done it myself so I'm speaking from experience.

Disclaimer: I've learned several languages over the course of my life; also co-founded a language learning company that used AI to help track and measure improvement. Oddly enough, someone from HN hit me up yesterday to ask about it. The company shut down in 2022 and I'm in a completely different industry now (non tech) so am fully able to talk about what we learned, where we made mistakes and where we innovated.

Also, how do you teach things like slang, jargon, body language, hand movements, etc.. that are essential to effective social or professional communication in a given culture? Memorizing words, grammar and conjugations, etc... is great but is only a small part of the language learning journey.

Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor

#36
post #33

Neat app. How do you measure linguistic progress? >* The hard part intervenes when you try to replicate the progress tracking and tailoring of the curriculum.* Perhaps you guys just aren't thinking about it in the right way ;) Progress tracking and measurement is significantly easier from a conceptual standpoint than you might think. I'm not just bullshitting here - I've actually done it myself so I'm speaking from e…

Absolutely agree on the slang stuff. Progress tracking is hard to do at scale in completely open-ended conversations since there are so many degrees of freedom within one conversation. If you have any tips and tricks, these would be much appreciated :)

Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor

#37

I tried logging in on Android but the confirmation email link just opens the app and does nothing. I've got 3 confirmation emails and same issue each time.

Nice! Well not nice since you're a bit stuck, but nice since we have heard of this issue but never were able to reproduce it. Can you click on the "check status" button? Does that fix the issue?

Before being forwarded into the app did you open a website that had some text like "Your email is now confirmed"?

Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor

#38

I've been building https://heylangley.com as a solo side project for a little while now. The initial MVP took about 2 months, though I have not had much time to market it. It's pretty much identical to this. I also applied to YC for W23 and was rejected. Not sure what else to say beyond this: if you have a project that you've been wanting to start, believe in yourself and build it!

The thing that really made the difference for us was the traction we got through the original launch HN post.

re: DuoLingo, I always hear the same thing and feel the same reaction :) If you are looking for another team member I'd love to help.

Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor

#39

Nice! I built the same thing to learn chinese[0], it even has the in-context word lookup! I have a feature request: if I don't have a pinyin IME installed, it's very hard to use - it would be nice to have an in-browser one! [0]: https://github.com/statusfailed/gptlingo

OK I played with this some more, it's so good - exactly what I dreamed of!! A couple more bits of feedback: (1) The "suggestion" / "I'm unsure" etc. feedback is fantastic (2) Word segmentation doesn't seem to be working properly, and so the context lookup doesn't work right. Example: 中国 should be parsed as a single word ("china"), but it's parsed as individual characters ("middle", "kingdom"). This means I have to ta…

Thanks! The tricky bit is to make this work in different languages where the "space" is not used to separate the different words, such as Chinese. We should implement a real Chinese lemmatizer there to chunk the words.

Not sure if you saw it, but we already have pinyin in there. If you open up the settings and tick "show pronunciations" they will appear above the chat messages.

Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor

#40
post #10

Couple things, all reported from Android Chrome: 1. The FAQ on the landing page hides questions as answers are opened, and it is not obvious that previous answers need to be closed to see everything. 2. On the FAQ page, when opening the hamburger menu, the menu is clipped and must options are hidden. 3. The FAQ question about pricing does not answer the question, and I see no where to get an answer. 4. Re: gamificati…

Re:Pricing, I mentioned something around it in the HN launch. Currently the price is 10-is USD/month.
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