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Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#13

Post by mariano54 »

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #11

Do you store conversations? And what's the general privacy philosophy behind the app?

We store the messages, but not the audio. We also store session summaries and a "user facts" summary that gets regenerated after every session, based on all session summaries, everything in our AWS DB.

You can delete your account at any time to fully wipe all your data, but there is no way to delete sessions ATM.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#14

Post by xmodem »

mariano54 wrote: post #9
xmodem wrote: post #5

This actually looks pretty neat. How have you been able to achieve such broad language support so quickly? How widely have you tested your supported languages on native-speakers and learners?

The STT and LLM support many languages out of the box. For TTS we use multiple providers based on their strengths and weaknesses (for example minimax is great for Chinese) We've done a lot of testing on Spanish, English, Italian, Japanese, and French, but much less on the others and none at all for some of the niche ones. The language support is based on the intersection of the languages that have low word errors rat…

Right - I think it would be appreciated by your users if you at the very least made it clear from the outset how well different languages are supported and what degree of testing you have done.

Certainly if your product were to mis-teach me important details, and I were to then find out that you had spent less time testing than I had spent learning, I would be quite angry.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#17

Post by akshayKMR »

Why not use the Gemini flash voice-api directly instead? Cost? I ask because from the demo, the tutor's voice seems mechanical. I've played with the gemini voice api and it's quite impressive for conversation with low latency, I'd say perfect for your use case. It even switches languages if I say "Okay, let's talk in $foo language".

The vocabulary tooling looks neat and well thought out.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#19

Post by chrischen »

Speaking of translation with LLMs I've been looking for a solution to quickly open a bi-directional translation context without having to prompt ChatGPT or any other LLM every time. iOS lets you set the action button to use the default translation app quickly, but the translation it provides is vastly inferior to LLMs.

Even some basic app that can pre-load the prompt doesn't seem to exist?

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#20

Post by anavat »

Thanks for working on this! Language learning really needs a breakthrough.

Now, I tried the web app and chose to learn Greek as a beginner. And while I had better experience with your app than with ChatGPT or Gemini voice modes, I still got lost 5 minutes in because the AI tutor doesn't seem to have a plan for me, nor does it "see" my struggles. For example, after asking me about a hobby, it gives me a long sentence in Greek about how how it is nice to hike in mountains. Being absolute noob I cannot reply to it, nor even repeat it. And I don't even know what it is expected from me at the moment. A human tutor here would probably repeat a part of the sentence with a translation and ask me to repeat, or would explain something. The AI just sits there waiting for me to make a sound, and when I make it, it goes on on a tangental subject of beach vacations. :)

Again, this is still relatively not bad, and I'm going to give it another try.

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