Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 282 posts

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

#251

Post by Alex-Programs »

adastra22 wrote: post #201
Alex-Programs wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, though I've added lots of privacy protections to at least partially mitigate that: - There's a global blacklist of sites, as well as phrases in the title/URL (e.g. "bank") - You can blacklist sites yourself - Each sentence is run against filters checking for medical/legal/etc info, as well as checks for addresses, card/social security numbers, etc. All the checks are done client side - There are also some speci…

What about a whitelist? I might just be interested in only having certain sites, like this one or Reddit, translated into my target language. That way I can be certain it is only turned on for sites that I am OK with sharing browsing history and not be concerned that I might have missed adding something to the blacklist.

That's a good point. At some point I ought to make a UBlock-origin style list of customisable rules.

At the moment I'm focused on translation quality, but I intend to add that.

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

#253

Post by mariano54 »

yorwba wrote: post #245
mariano54 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimax's new model is quite good. We use their voices for some of our Japanese tutors. The pitch accent is almost perfect. There are incorrect reading or Chinese readings occasionally, but you can tell when that happens due to the furigana being different

If you have the correct furigana, you could even detect when the TTS model picked the wrong reading and regenerate. But how do you know the furigana are correct? Unless you start out fully human-annotated text, you need some automated procedure to add furigana, which pushes the problem from "TTS AI picked the wrong reading" to "furigana AI picked the wrong reading."

Yes it pushes the problem, but it's a much easier problem, and models like Gemini flash 2.5 do very well.

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

#254

Post by thinkingtoilet »

TypingOutBugs wrote: post #224
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #2

>We didn’t want to focus too much on gamification. Thank you so much for this. Duolingo is literally unbearable because it's so gamified. I'll try it out later. I've seen a few of these apps, can I seamlessly go between my native language and the language I'm trying to learn? If I am trying to learn Hindi, can I ask a question in English in the middle of a conversation?

Babbel is better than Duolingo!

Unfortunately, Babbel doesn't have a Hindi course. I wish it did.

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

#255

Post by juandsc »

I really like the idea and I'm a potential customer, but I don't think this is ready yet. I've been learning Chinese for a while and decided to give this a shot and at my level (somewhere between HSK 2 and 3) it's very frustrating:

When I babble (as someone at my level does) and say "eh... a bit of sentence eh... a bit more of sentence" half the times it cuts me off in the first eh... or the second one. This is extremely frustrating, in fact I didn't even finish the free 20 minutes trial because of this.

Another issue is that like all LLMs it's bad at maintaining context of a conversation. I tried speaking about cars with it, as it's a topic I like so I thought it'd be cool and all of a sudden it's asking me what's my favourite ice cream. Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% certain I said something about ice cream but any human would understand I didn't want to say that.

Also I tried it with Spanish as I'm a native speaker. The speech recognition is bad, I don't know what sort of processing this does but it has a lot of mistakes, however it's very rare that chatGPT ever fails to transcript. I'd say well over 20% of sentences were misunderstood.

The idea is cool, but I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who wants to learn Spanish.

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

#256

Post by deadbabe »

owebmaster wrote: post #210
deadbabe wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re still thinking about mass market UX. A UX someone builds for themselves and makes sense to them is going to be way better than something a designer puts together for the masses. That’s the promise of AI, totally custom software down to the individual user level.

I will still bet that great apps with much better UX than your average vibecoder will still continue to make people rich.

UX won’t make you rich anymore in a world where people want their own custom versions of apps.

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

#257

Post by ookdatnog »

iandanforth wrote: post #117
antonaf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I can understand and empathize with your experience. Quite honestly our current focus is more for B1+ students. That 0 -> 1 / bootstrapping of the language is much better served by traditional material that is less talking / listening-heavy.

This is demonstrably false. Natural language acquisition is almost entirely listening and talking. The fastest and most consistently effective way to learn a language is immersion. The reason traditional material doesn't attempt immersive techniques is because it is much much easier to print a static book than it is to produce interactive and adaptive content. The promise and potential of LLM based language learning…

Learning primarily through listening and talking only works if you have an enormous amount of high quality data, ie, the situation you're in as a baby when you're surrounded by native speakers who are producing speech for hours every day.

If you are an adult and want to spend, say, a couple of hours each week learning a language from scratch, especially without constant access to a native speaker, your initial progress will be much faster if you study grammar and vocabulary in a traditional class from a text book, than if you just try to pick up patterns from listening to the TV or something.

I can't source my claim. I attended a public lecture years ago from a researcher about exactly this misconception.

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

#258

Post by 0bi1A4xvXtQCO »

I created an account just to provide feedback. I would consider myself the core audiance and would be definitly be willing to pay for it. I am learning Japanese with, but, since I am living outside of Japan, struggle to find good opportunities to output on a regular basis. An AI-based language tutor would make my life much easier.

A few comments from the 20min trial I had:

- About the positive aspects: There were definitly parts of the conversation where I was genuinely suprised with the naturalness. Overall, I felt that the demo already helped me practice my output a bit. From this, I definitely believe that AI-based language tutors might become quite widespread soon as they could become really good language exchange partners. In my case, I still have low speaking skills (~Japanese N4, A2), so just having any chance to practice verb conjugations etc is already immensily helpful.

- I also like that there is no gamification aspect. I prefer apps where users can decide how they use them. A lot of Japanese learners, people already use anki for vocab, etc., so forcing extra vocab practice would me definitly quit the app.

Some feedback for improvement:

- Due to my still low speaking skills, I often need mid-sentence pauses which are at least 1-2 seconds long. When I pause, the sentence is already half-transcribed, sometimes in another language. I think I had moments where then the sentence is cut-off entirely. At least, it makes me pressured to finish the sentence in a fluent manner without much pauses.

- I know you want to have multilingual transriptions, but maybe you could add some language bias in transcribing the speech?

- About the cutting off: If you have some sort of VAD frontend: Maybe you could adjust its parameters based on estimated language skills of the users (beginners have longer pauses)

- I saw that my sentences were rated. But they were rated only in text, even though I said that my mistakes should be corrected right away (The speech-based AI partner just kept on talking about the topics). Maybe I have overlooked something, but is there some overview of my mistakes besides the text-based corrections?

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

#259

Post by SkyBelow »

antonaf wrote: post #50
iandanforth wrote: post #46

Alright, having tried this with Japanese I can say it's frustrating. As a near complete beginner the tutor kept speaking in Japanese even when I said "sorry I don't understand" repeatedly and then when I asked it to start in English and then gradually transition to Japanese it lasted all of one sentence in English before switching back. I can totally see how this would be useful conversation practice if you've progre…

Yes, I can understand and empathize with your experience. Quite honestly our current focus is more for B1+ students. That 0 -> 1 / bootstrapping of the language is much better served by traditional material that is less talking / listening-heavy.

I think I'm around A2 in Japanese and find myself kinda scared by all these talking apps. I don't mind texting, because it gives me time to look up what I don't know and much more time to think about my response, but talking just makes me feel very anxious. Eventually I have to get over the barrier, but it is a barrier to entry and could scare people away.

I do think immersion is generally better, but it is not only harder, an AI app doesn't seem like it could do the right kind of immersion (missing body language, visual cues, seeing the mouth movements, and all sorts of other things one gets from watching a podcast, or even better, in person interaction).

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

#260

Post by mariano54 »

0bi1A4xvXtQCO wrote: post #258

I created an account just to provide feedback. I would consider myself the core audiance and would be definitly be willing to pay for it. I am learning Japanese with, but, since I am living outside of Japan, struggle to find good opportunities to output on a regular basis. An AI-based language tutor would make my life much easier. A few comments from the 20min trial I had: - About the positive aspects: There were def…

Thanks for the feedback.

1. The response latency / patience can be configured in the quick settings (tap the gear during the call).

2. There already is a bias in transcription. It's something we're actively improving, multilingual transcription isn't a solved problem yet

3. It is supposed to correct you actively if you have corrections enabled (check the settings). But we received feedback that it's not enough, so we will ramp it up soon

Post reply on HN