We should get in touch. I built a language partner in Chinese about a week ago using GPT, continuous real-time speech recognition via webkit speech recognition, and Polly TTS so you don't even have to press any buttons, you can just have a fluid conversation the entire time.
Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
311–320 of 354 posts
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Believe me, if I the syntax in Dutch would keep, get you a very strange result. (This is a literal translation of a correct Dutch sentence.)
> Believe me, if I the syntax in Dutch would keep, get you a very strange result. (This is a literal translation of a correct Dutch sentence.) Of course there are differences, but both Dutch and English are West Germanic languages (descended from proto-Germanic) whereas Portuguese is a Romance language (descended from Latin). Here is a handy tree showing how various languages are related to each other: https://d1sjtl…
Such a tree mostly describes word similarity. But translating words is not what an AI (or more generally a computer) has problems with.
It's word ordering and idioms where AIs stand or fall. Things that show very little correlation in the evolution of language.
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#313Some people mentioned that the translation/conversation can feel pretty off. But there is a much more fundamental problem here. If you want to be fluent, you need to spend hundreds of hours speaking the language. It is really difficult to speak for hours to a machine that doesn't express any emotions and is not excited about anything.
Humans, when speaking the language, connect to other humans through emotions and feelings. That is what gets us going. That is what keeps the conversation interesting (even for intermediate students).
This is the same reason why ads from Apple always show how family meets, or a kid scores a goal in a match and not just simply says "1.8GHz, 4GB ram" that only speaks to our neocortex.
That's why unless computers pass the Turing test, it is unlikely this will "enable people to talk their way to fluency".
I do agree though it is a cool tech.
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#314First, I’d like to say I really love this product. Thanks for making this. Second, where are the companies that are doing this type of thing for NPC dialogue in games. Imagine playing Mass Effect or Skyrim but where you get to ask whatever and the NPC responds with something that fits within the space of possible answers based on the prompt that defined their existence.
If it were free text, sounds like a thing I would use once for the novelty then forget about, because it's not an entertaining gameplay feature. Maybe an AI could generate incidental dialog, things NPCs yell out in reaction to things around them, to keep it from always being from the same list of two or three reactions. Just my two cents. I want to play a well written and fun game, not a chat bot.
Talk to NPCs for hours about their boring lives thatching roofs and keeping shops, until they get weirded out by all the questions. Yeah, doesn't really sound fun.
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#315It really looks cool. But, why it doesn't have English? Or meybe if it does have, why isn't showed first? People who use language learning apps are focused in learning English most of the time. Still those who speak fluently are trying to improve their speaking and listening. And the first language which appeared for me was Brazilian Portuguese which is my mother language. [Edit] I was trying the Brazilian Portuguese…
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Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#316I tried using it in Portuguese and it's cool but it seems very off, just a huge number of things that don't sound even remotely natural or idiomatic. But when I click the translate button, the English translation is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. SO... I'm highly suspecting that, behind the scenes, the "real" conversation is happening in English, and it's translating in both directions. Which is always going to…
You never hear Brazilian Portuguese with perfect grammar. If it were a Portuguese accent, it would be more realistic.
I don't think that's really true. Plenty brazilians speak with good grammar.
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
He’s talking about unnatural (non-idiomatic) language. That’s not an issue you can fix with better grammar; there are many language learners who possess good intonation and pronunciation, and natural (idiomatic) speech, but poor grammar: their idiomatic speech more than makes up for grammatical mistakes. Source: learning languages for 10+, have met students as described above.
I interacted a bit with the AI and the Portuguese is fine, it's just that it conjugates, uses the proper pronouns, etc. These things a typical Brazilian does not do. The difference between standard Portuguese and oral language in Brazil is enormous.
I suppose it depends on the region, but I don't think I or most of my friends make many grammatical mistakes like that.
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#318Maybe it’s getting too much traffic right now, but when I try to start a conversation in German, it just hangs after the first thing I say.
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#319No arabic?
Re: Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Translation or transliteration?
No transliteration: Dutch uses the Latin alphabet.
Maybe word for word translation is the phrase we're looking for? As opposed to an idiomatic translation. Transliteration means phonetically translating from one alphabet to another, in order to p
reserve the pronunciation.