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

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

#71

Post by statusfailed »

losteric wrote: post #57
grbsh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I wouldn’t really worry about Duolingo - they cater to people who want to _feel_ like they are learning a language (for 2-5 mins a day), not people who actually want to make progress. Even if they release features like this, they won’t be competing with you. Duolingo is also the worst example of inappropriate gamification I’ve ever seen.

Duolingo is good at going from nothing to something. That’s important. I noticed in this app, trying a language I don’t know, I immediately get blocked on lesson 1 step 2 - my answer is wrong, but I know nothing and there are zero mechanisms to learn without prior context to guess and extrapolate upon.

> Duolingo is good at going from nothing to something

Seconding this. I got noticeably better at Chinese after using duolingo every day. I feel like I hit a ceiling now and it's not helping too much, but it definitely worked.

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

#72

Post by statusfailed »

Hadjimina wrote: post #39
statusfailed wrote: post #27

Earlier 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.

At least for chinese there are off-the-shelf word segmenters you can use like jieba[0]- I used it in gptlingo and it Just Works(TM).

The "show pronounciations" setting just turns on pinyin above characters - what I want is to type pinyin and enter chinese characters. Actually showing the pinyin above characters is quite distracting!

[0]: https://pypi.org/project/jieba/

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

#73

Post by keeptrying »

Great stuff. Spoken language learning is definitely the weak point of companeis like Duolingo and is the part of the language learning that most people want in the first place.

That lag in the video is still a bit too long.

If you can get that down to nearly instantaneous, I think this would have a lot of appeal.

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

#74

Post by Hadjimina »

bricee98 wrote: post #67

I 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 wa…

We're using LLMs and good ol'ML. These systems are never going to be 100% accurate. Then again humans are also not 100% correct and we're working hard on ironing out the kinks like the one you just discovered.

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

#75

Post by Hadjimina »

ninjaa wrote: post #70

This 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 kno…

I'm not sure how I can reach out, I did not find an email address. Can you ping me at philipp@univerbal.app?

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

#76

Post by Hadjimina »

tobymather123 wrote: post #66
tobymather123 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ahhh fair enough

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

#77

Post by Hadjimina »

keeptrying wrote: post #73

Great stuff. Spoken language learning is definitely the weak point of companeis like Duolingo and is the part of the language learning that most people want in the first place. That lag in the video is still a bit too long. If you can get that down to nearly instantaneous, I think this would have a lot of appeal.

Especially for people who are already fluent in a language, the lag can be a tad too long. For beginners, it's more ok since you get a nice "break".

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

#78

Post by Hadjimina »

SorrisoAmarelo wrote: post #63

Hi 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 repl…

Yeah, that makes sense. Checking my inbox now!

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

#79

Post by emursebrian »

As the founder of a startup focused on language learning, I am really interested in how AI could improve the experience. At this stage, I think it is pretty far off from being useful as a conversation-partner/tutor replacement.

I agree with most of your assessment on tutoring, but replacing the human and emotional connection with a person isn't something that will be easily replicated (or at all!) with AI. I've been successful in hiring tutors that I've liked and tailoring the curriculum to meet my needs. You do need to put in the work, but coming prepared with a curriculum and what I want to learn in each lesson has been very effective for me. I've also tried to pick tutors with similar interests so that the conversation is interesting and engaging.

I prefer my tutoring sessions to be mostly conversation, but I usually reserve some time in the beginning of the session to ask questions about grammar or to review something I have written. I mostly used non-professional tutors who were doing the tutoring to make a little extra money on the side, so at times schedules would change and I would need to find a tutor. There was definitely some time lost in getting to know a new tutor and getting back into the flow of things.

Building a curriculum or taking detailed notes after and during a lesson aren't things every student is going to have the ability or desire to do. These are a couple of aspects we would like to improve with Emurse. Marry one-on-one tutoring with self-paced instruction. Track what was learned in your one-on-one tutoring sessions in the app and create continuity between sessions and different tutors.

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

#80

Post by jairuhme »

Hadjimina wrote: post #74
bricee98 wrote: post #67

I 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 wa…

We're using LLMs and good ol'ML. These systems are never going to be 100% accurate. Then again humans are also not 100% correct and we're working hard on ironing out the kinks like the one you just discovered.

How are you guys assessing the accuracy? Sure, LLM's aren't going to be 100% accurate. But if I pick up a Spanish textbook, there is a right answer 100% of the time (okay, aside from publishing errors)
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