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

91–100 of 282 posts

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

#91

Post by mariano54 »

tmaly wrote: post #87

I want to build some AI tutors at home to help my kids with some of their school subjects and interests. I help them with subjects I know, but for other subjects I often do not have enough background. What are you best tips/ideas/design patterns you learned when making this app?

Some random tips which could help you

- Don't go over 10k tokens in the prompts as the intelligence and memory degrades

- Summarize sessions and save the summaries, potentially summarize the summaries as well

- use VAPI or realtime api if you want to build fast. Building the full pipeline takes a while

- try out different models and see how personality varies. Our favorite is gpt4.1 with temperature 1.

- goal system. The promot should always contain the current goal, and the next goal. Evaluate goals with another LLM, and dynamically change the prompt

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

#92

Post by mariano54 »

drakonka wrote: post #32
mariano54 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah we need to improve the beginner experience, it's more tailored towards intermediate/advanced students at the moment.

Do you mean that the experience is meant to have more structure if you pick the intermediate or advanced level? (fwiw I did pick intermediate for my Swedish level in the app). My thinking is - I can have unstructured conversations with Advanced Voice Mode or in real life here in Sweden. What I'd really appreciate is a guided learning experience taking me up from intermediate/slightly above intermediate to fluent in t…

There is a structured curriculum that gets generated after the intro lesson (if you responded yes to the curriculum question).

This is available for all proficiencies. It's just much harder to talk for hours in a new language as a beginner. It's usable but requires more effort.

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

#94

Post by deanc »

M4R5H4LL wrote: post #89
deanc wrote: post #79

I built a basic version of this for myself with a prompt in chat gpt in an afternoon. It's great that you've built this yourself, but where's the magic? If it's your prompt it can probably be extracted in a few minutes by those who know how to do so.

Why not finish, publish it to the store and get income if it was that straightforward? There's a long way to go between a toy application to demonstrate a product, and something on shelves actually selling. In other words, you can most often quickly tackle the concept or trivial parts of an app, but it's much harder to get a real product out, even if the implementation looks straightforward on surface.

That's exactly my point. This is at best a toy application driven by a prompt that many people will be able to extract and recreate. Putting the pieces together is easy and letting someone talk to an AI is not a particularly difficult problem. Creating magic and making people come back to learn the language is entirely different and I don't see anything magical here.

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

#95

Post by mariano54 »

vunderba wrote: post #56

The ChatGPT mobile app in hands-free voice conversation mode works quite well for language practice with one important call-out: you have to give it a topic at the beginning otherwise it won't be able to drive the conversation forward and will stick to banal pleasantries. What I usually do is pick a random blurb in the news and paste the entire thing along with the Reuters link at the beginning and inform ChatGPT tha…

Yeah, agreed, we started with a similar observation. These voice models are getting better quickly.

You do need an app to create a holistic learning experience just for language learning. Customized curriculum, tons of prompting, AI models chosen for transcription accuracy, flashcards/dictionary, etc.

We also support hands free mode, and many other things are customizable like slang, speaking speed, target language usage, etc.

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

#96

Post by sirodoht »

anavat wrote: post #20

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…

Funnily enough I said my native language is Greek but then it responded with an error and reset my onboarding guide. Then, I lied that my native language is English, which worked. But now it calls me Anton, rather than the name I said I have!

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

#97

Post by jphelan »

mel0n_ wrote: post #90
jphelan wrote: post #69

I tried the app. I love that you’re tackling this and I’m rooting for you. I’ll tell you about myself, my experience, and my thoughts. I’m currently learning French as a beginner and I’ve learned other languages in the past. I’ve trued Duolingo as well as italki and frantasic as well as just ChatGPT. I am very familiar with Anki and I think it’s critical to make your own flashcards by choosing images and sounds. I do…

Have have you found to be the most helpful services/resources when learning French? I'm starting this journey

Congrats! I'm happy to suggest some ideas. This is near and dear to me so I've got a lot to say lol. I think when beginning French the most helpful services for beginners relate to pronunciation and language comprehension because that is the "secret trick". Seriously, I recommend giving pronunciation/comprehension a lot of attention at first. There are only like 10-20 new sounds (plenty of resources to find the list if you search IPA French https://www.frenchcourses-paris.com/french-lessons-in-paris/... find one that clicks for you) so don't worry that it's too much even though I know it's hard and looks cryptic at first. I think most people end up mis-learning to read French like it's funny English then they will never have a good experience and certainly won't be able to have a conversation. I had the same experience with Chinese where if you don't learn tones at the start then it will always be miserable. For example in Chinese you can ask for dumplings and people literally just hear you saying sleep unless you add the right inflection (like the way we make a statement a question vs a demand).

In terms of the exact resources for pronunciation - The Fluent Forever guy has a good anki deck for $12 (I bought it and I'd recommend it - just have patience and know he tends to over explain IMHO but the cards are linked in there and they're great) https://blog.fluent-forever.com/chapter3/ and I'd recommend finding your own favorite YouTube videos to explain how to pronounce the French R and nasal sounds. I would try watching some YouTube in French just to wet your beak. Know that it's frustrating to not yet have good comprehension but keep at pronunciation/comprehension and you'll get there.

I recommend making Anki cards for like the top 100 and then the top 500 words, and include images and sounds (Anki strengths).

I'd suggest to have a goal of understanding some rewarding things like children's T.V. (Bob l'éponge) or language learning YouTube (Easy French) - really fun. Then after you master some early words and feel like you have a "French ear" jump in and do some "early reader" kinds of book (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/short-stories-in-french-for...) because that will be really rewarding and reenforcing.

I also recommend jumping in to italki probably earlier than you feel comfortable (or this app, as it continues to improve!) and doing some community conversations in just an unstructured way. Just be ready to try a couple people and find someone you like. If you can travel to France I think that is probably best, too! You'll be very happy that you've got a good "R" at this point.

I think at that point you're ready to look at the A1/A2/B1/B2 test content and learn it on your own pretty easily or work with a structured tutor. It should be chill and not too challenging at that point.

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

#98

Post by leonidasv »

Question: ChatGPT voice mode seems to have too much tolerance for mispronouncing. Sometimes, it understands you even you mispronounce something in a phrase, and it's not aware enough to correct you - it even says your pronunciation is correct if asked. It's good at grammar, though.

It makes me think the audio goes through a kind of voice-to-text model before the answer, so nuance is lost; or the model wasn't trained to distinguish between correct and incorrect pronunciations.

Does Issen have this issue too? Pronunciation vices are common when you're learning a new language.

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

#99

Post by mariano54 »

itake wrote: post #26

I'm trying to learn vietnamese, but the lessons are really really rough and borderline bad advice. --- AI: Anh mệt is good if bạn are a man speaking about yourself. You can also say, “Em mệt” if you’re a woman. this isn't correct. If you are of "older brother" age and are male, you say Anh. Em is for if you are "younger person" (does not matter the gender). Women tend to prefer being called "em" (even if they are old…

We are really sorry for the subpar experience. We did not test Vietnamese, and it seems like the quality is not sufficient. Thanks for pointing out the issues.

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

#100

Post by Velorivox »

tempodox wrote: post #40
itake wrote: post #26

I'm trying to learn vietnamese, but the lessons are really really rough and borderline bad advice. --- AI: Anh mệt is good if bạn are a man speaking about yourself. You can also say, “Em mệt” if you’re a woman. this isn't correct. If you are of "older brother" age and are male, you say Anh. Em is for if you are "younger person" (does not matter the gender). Women tend to prefer being called "em" (even if they are old…

This sounds very much like the kinds of mistakes that LLMs typically make. It's a pity, I would love a good language learning platform.

A fundamental problem with language learning built around an LLM is that the one thing you can guarantee is that no two people will have a consistent experience, nor is there ever going to be a 100% freedom-from-error. That makes it very hard to predict and therefore market what or how people will learn.

I think this company will end up pivoting into a B2B context before long. Hopefully they will still stick to the mission, but who knows (and I wouldn't fault them if they don't – survival comes first).

Post reply on HN