Hi guys, just tried this as an intermediate Chinese learner. Really love it overall. I have an IRL tutor as well and it's very interesting to compare. Happy to give feedback offline but high-level so far:
1. Adding pinyin for Chinese words when clicking would be great, and adding 'word' rather than character-only clickable dictionary, e.g. from Pleco. That's a Chinese specific issue
2. Harder, but when I say something wrong, pause, and re-state, if it could fix my answer with what I said and delete the wrong bit that would be insanely cool. As that's what a teacher hears, the self-correcting is a good sign
Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor
61–70 of 137 posts
Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> We should implement a real Chinese lemmatizer there to chunk the words.
Or find all substrings that are listed in a dictionary (≈everyone uses cc-cedict https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=cc-cedict ) and give translations for all of them. That way, the user won't be limited to any particular chunking granularity, which is always a finicky aspect of word segmenters to fine-tune.
Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor
#63Hi Philipp
I think that the sooner Univerbal is on the market the better - it's marketable as it is. Just needs finishing touches to the layouts, buttons etc. Leave gamification and even the "progress tracking and tailoring of the curriculum" until you have a viable product and have made your presence known online.
You have a unique product to market i.e. interaction with a tutor, through speaking and having the replies read out loud + it’s available whenever you want, affordable to everyone. All the other language courses do not have this.
As for games, they can be a separate section, just as you already have buttons for Tutor, Translator, Hints etc.
I have contacted you on your website with a question about using Univerbal on a desktop.
Good luck!
Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor
#64Hi guys, just tried this as an intermediate Chinese learner. Really love it overall. I have an IRL tutor as well and it's very interesting to compare. Happy to give feedback offline but high-level so far: 1. Adding pinyin for Chinese words when clicking would be great, and adding 'word' rather than character-only clickable dictionary, e.g. from Pleco. That's a Chinese specific issue 2. Harder, but when I say somethin…
Pinyin is already accessible if you click on the gear icon in the top right and enable "pronunciations". When you make a mistake you can also have a look at it, read the suggestion and the "correct it" by clicking on the correction button and repeating the correct version of it. That will make the error disappear.
I guess both of these issues are too hidden right now.
Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor
#65Hi guys, just tried this as an intermediate Chinese learner. Really love it overall. I have an IRL tutor as well and it's very interesting to compare. Happy to give feedback offline but high-level so far: 1. Adding pinyin for Chinese words when clicking would be great, and adding 'word' rather than character-only clickable dictionary, e.g. from Pleco. That's a Chinese specific issue 2. Harder, but when I say somethin…
Pinyin is already accessible if you click on the gear icon in the top right and enable "pronunciations". When you make a mistake you can also have a look at it, read the suggestion and the "correct it" by clicking on the correction button and repeating the correct version of it. That will make the error disappear. I guess both of these issues are too hidden right now.
They were but TIL! Will set that up
Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pinyin is already accessible if you click on the gear icon in the top right and enable "pronunciations". When you make a mistake you can also have a look at it, read the suggestion and the "correct it" by clicking on the correction button and repeating the correct version of it. That will make the error disappear. I guess both of these issues are too hidden right now.
They were but TIL! Will set that up
ah no sorry, I meant pinyin when you click the character, right now it's just a translation of that character. I don't want permanently visible pinyin of the line
Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor
#67I like the idea, but when I started practicing some Spanish, I noticed it gave me incorrect grammar advice (it claimed that the subjunctive form of “creer” is “creen” - it was right that the subjunctive was needed, but that would be “crean”). That makes me nervous to use it for a language that I know less well like Korean because I won’t be able to tell if the grammar feedback I’m getting is accurate.
If there’s a way to make it more robust on that front I could definitely see myself using it!
Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor
#68> One thing I’d love to get HN’s opinion on is how much gamification you think we should add.
It would be very nice if any such gamification were optional. I personally don't want to win awards or other internet points - I want to learn a language.
Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor
#69I 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"?
The "Check Status" button shows a loading indicator and then nothing happens. When I click the link in the email it brings me directly to the app, but just to the same screen I was on previously ("Verify your email to continue").
I had an account previously (before the rename) and I'm using it to log in. Maybe it's something to do with that?
Re: Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor
#70This is super great. The core mechanic is absurdly great and works much much better than I expected.
I also see that it's not an end-to-end language tutoring solution but a companion you can use to test your real-world language skills. Awesome stuff.
If you're interested in reaching out to real language schools, I run a marketplace for pre-college programs, Language Schools are like 20-30% of our business. Let me know!