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Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI

• Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
  Very cool idea, but doesn't it have a level adjustment? For example, I'm learning Chinese but my level is quite basic at the moment, it would be cool if the bot could adapt its vocabulary.
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    Yep, this is a highly requested feature..but as you can imagine a bit tricky. We are working on it. However, I am using it for Greek and I'm on an early A2 level...so I think if you are at that point you can probably get pretty far by using the hints and translator.
    • Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
      Yes, to be honest even at my level (also A2) it's pretty useful, thanks to the integrated translator. And it already kind of adapts by default, in the sense that if I talk about easy topics (daily schedule, and things like that) it will talk about easy topics as well, so it's not like it's coming up with quantum mechanic terms. It's a suggestion for improvement but it's already very good and I think I'm going to use it a lot. By the way, just in case you don't know and you find it interesting, in the case of Chinese there was a crowdfunding campaign about a hardware speaker that would do something like this (https://webmarketkings.com/lily-chinese-scam/ https://webmarketkings.com/lily-chinese-scam/). It never delivered. I was one of the backers... but well, that's life with Kickstarter and the like, sometimes.
  • _nhynes 4y ago
    您好！我也正在学中文，但是我也很初学者。What do you do for speaking practice? I live in China, so I get plenty of listening practice, but not too much on speaking (it's hard to keep people's attention with broken sentences :P). I made this an (https://letsyiya.com https://letsyiya.com) to help with that. It's not as good as I'd like it to be, but I've found it helpful. I'd be glad to hear your setup :)
    • Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
      你好！ 我住在西班牙，所以我没有太多机会说。There is an academy near me but it's hard to find time (busy job) so my listening practice is mostly apps (Chairman's Bao and an Anki deck with audio) and videos sometimes, and speaking practice is almost none (repeating Anki flashcards and sometimes speaking to Google Translate to see if it comes up with what I'm trying to say... this website is better in that respect!) BTW, your link doesn't work for me right now.
• melvinmelih 4y ago
  It gets a bit confused when switching languages, I tried Turkish first and then Spanish, and now the AI is speaking Turkish with a Spanish accent lol
• nrabault 4y ago
  Fascinating, I will finally be able to work on my Italian
• phpisatrash 4y ago
  It 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 mode, and apparently it is Portuguese from Portugal, because the answer given used a verb tense that is not common in Brazil.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • sebastiansm 4y ago
    Yeah. I been looking for a few months for services to improve my English in a cheap/free way. Until now some Discord channels have been my solution to practice conversation, but it would be nice to have this kind of service to speak anytime about any topic.
    • swyx 4y ago
      for what its worth what you just typed is completely indistinguishable from a native speaker, well done
      • sebastiansm 4y ago
        The advantage of typing is that I can erase and improve what I'm trying to communicate. In real time I struggle thinking about pronunciation and if what I'm saying is correct or understandable by the other person.
    • elliekelly 4y ago
      Have you tried playing online multiplayer games? I found I was able to learn how to “think” in another language much better when I was under pressure to communicate something quickly in real time. It’s easy to fall into the trap of always translating to/from your native language which isn’t the end of the world when you’re reading or writing but it makes for pretty awkward and stilted conversations.
• glcheetham 4y ago
  Wow, I just tried the mandarin setting. Amazing work!
• danielbln 4y ago
  What's the tech stack? Whisper for language transcription, GPT-3 for NLP?
  • fareesh 4y ago
    Isn't it generally expensive to build on top of GPT-3?
    • danielbln 4y ago
      Depends on your workloads. 750 words will cost you 0.2 cents, that can be very expensive or reasonably priced, depending on what you do.
• nonasktell 4y ago
  Cool!(but yeah english is really important!!) which models do you use for speech recognition and text generation?
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    Yup english is top of at the top of the to-do list. We use some APIs from a few different big players. One that I want to highligh which is waayy better than the rest is Microsoft speech to text, which not only recognized what you say but can also do punctuation and capitalization. Instead of "do you like to eat pizza" which is what google speech to text would give you, microsoft recognizes it as "Do you like to eat pizza?". Small but important difference.
    • nonasktell 4y ago
      have you tried the new whisper model from openai?
• imranq 4y ago
  Very nice! Please add arabic when you have a chance
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    Arabic is very high on the list but suuupppeeer tricky...
    • bsaul 4y ago
      how is it worse than chinese or japanese ? i'm super curious..
• zeryx 4y ago
  Looks like there's still a few bugs, completely unable to have my voice recorded correctly or the install link to work on android
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    Yep we are super early and still have some bugs. Could you tell me what browser you were using? B.c. maybe you did not give the browser the permission to record stuff with the microphone and then things break.
    • adriand 4y ago
      Agreed that this is very cool, this is a massive unsolved niche in the language learning market. Execute effectively on this and you've got it made. So I noticed that on MacOS Firefox, the app never asked me for microphone permissions and thus didn't work at all. But worked well on Chrome (which I only have for testing purposes).
• andrepd 4y ago
  With the current state of AI text generation, isn't this a recipe for disaster? By talking to a chatbot while learning a language you are liable to pick up whatever (vast) errors and mistakes the bot makes.
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    That's a good point. However, I think we have reached a point where AI text generation has come pretty far and will only continue to get better. Even if you pick up one or two mistakes the A.I. makes but are otherwise fluent, isn't that already an improvement? (Not a rhetorical question, genuinely interested)
    • yorwba 4y ago
      There's also the issue of the AI picking up your mistakes and adding more of its own to match the input. When AI Dungeon came out, I recommended it to a friend as a way to practice English, but when she showed me a playthrough, it turned out that the AI had adapted to her writing style full of misspellings and grammar errors, so it probably didn't help at all. (I haven't been able to test your chatbot yet to see whether it suffers from the same problem.) In general, practicing something allows you to do it with less and less effort until you barely have to think about it at all, but if you're practicing making mistakes , that just means you'll be making mistakes without thinking about it. To get better, you also need to notice your mistakes to change what you're doing accordingly. So I think a bot that can guess what you were trying to say and can tell you what you should've said instead might be a bit more useful.
  • bsaul 4y ago
    IMHO, better practice with mistakes, then fix them later once you talk to native speakers, than not practice at all. For kickstarting a language practice, this site honestly seems ideal..
    • andrepd 4y ago
      Eh, I tested it with a language I speak and it was almost comically bad. Grammar constructions nobody would use, mixing vocabulary from two different variants in the same sentence, etc.
• yurishimo 4y ago
  I recognize the voice of the Dutch examples from Duolingo. What model are you using to generate these?
• Tade0 4y ago
  From the FAQ: > It might, however, also be that the conversation partner is feeling uncomfortable talking about certain things. Does this mean that users talk to actual people or am I not understanding this correctly?
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    So in the background we are checking if the stuff you are talking about is "risky". If that is detected, the conversation partner will just answer with something like "hmmm I don't feel comfortable talking about that" to keep it all in safe territory.
    • e-clinton 4y ago
      How do you scale that? Or is the goal to automate that as well with AI?
    • foobarbecue 4y ago
      Do you really mean risky, or do you mean risqué?
• aeroaks 4y ago
  I am stuck at the loading screen when selecting Dutch. BTW I am using Firefox
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    Looking into it right now.
• peterhartree 4y ago
  Nice. Please add Icelandic some time soon. I'd probably be willing to pay for that.
• cuoco 4y ago
  No english?
• kodir 4y ago
  Very cool. Just tried it - works really well. Are you raising money? How can I invest?
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    if you are serious about this (which would be dope), send an email to philipp@quazel.com
• OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  Given that a lot of conversational chat bots end up devolving into... lets charitably call it 'repugnant ideas'... I am not sure that learning to talk from them is wise. Interesting concept, but I'm going to pass for now. I don't want to be talking to a friend and find that I accidently espoused the ideas of the third reich.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    According to the author, they censor various topics
    • vintermann 4y ago
      Given that's it Azure, that's probably done for them whether they want to or not.
• qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
  Could you add Icelandic ? It’s spoken by just over 300,000 people and I consider it be “endangered”
• singularity2001 4y ago
  doesnt work with ads blocked
  • frankzander 4y ago
    In Brave it works. FF not
  • bsaul 4y ago
    works on FF mac with Ublock origin.
• saiya-jin 4y ago
  Great idea, but when trying french the UI hangs indefinitely waiting for my input (spinning wheel type of waiting sign), after clicking on microphone (latest Firefox with uBlock origin)
• werdnapk 4y ago
  Loading screen doesn't go away in Firefox after choosing a language.
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    hmm strange just tried it. What langauge are you using?
    • e-clinton 4y ago
      Same for me. Spanish.
  • fersarr 4y ago
    Same here but in chrome
  • rtavares 4y ago
    This happened to me too. I'm using Brave and I needed to disable its Shields. Maybe you have some extension impacting the site, like an ad blocker?
  • probably_wrong 4y ago
    Same. My Firefox console has a bunch of errors about a Same-Origin/CORS issue. Edit: same issue in Chrome: Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/nextjs-yak.appspot.com/o/scenes%2Fscene_gettingToKnow.json https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/nextjs-yak.appsp...' from origin 'https://talk.quazel.com https://talk.quazel.com' has been blocked by CORS policy: Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource.
  • loxias 4y ago
    I saw that bug too, if you refresh it enough, it goes away.
• scrollaway 4y ago
  Hey this is a cool idea. I tried it with Russian -- on Chrome at least, nothing works with my mic (but the mic permission worked, it just doesn't "listen" or show feedback when I speak). Hey, hit me up by email (see my profile), I'd love to talk to you and help out with anything you might need. Languages are one of my passions; I'm a polyglot (fr/el/sv/ru/en) and have a lot of opinions on language learning and teaching.
• efxz 4y ago
• tzury 4y ago
  English?
• nixcraft 4y ago
  This looks so nice. On a side note, I used Duolingo for about 7 or 8 months (I spent like 15-20 minutes) and learned a little Japanese and Portuguese (European). I think Duolingo is an enjoyable app. Then I lost interest :( I started again. Let us hope this time I will finish all levels. Any chance of getting Japanese and Portuguese (European)?
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • DoryMinh 4y ago
    I think he has Japanese
• bilsbie 4y ago
  Here’s what I think would be a killer feature. Have it use AI to adapt the conversation level to the level of learner. Smaller words, repetition, slower. If you notice this is how adults talk to babies and children to help them learn the language.
  • DoryMinh 4y ago
    I'd agree but it depends on what AI engine that he uses to generate the conversation
  • randcraw 4y ago
    There are many possible knobs on such a tool that could be wonderfully useful. I'd love to press a button that provides critical feedback: marking for errors or suggesting improvements for style (grammar, better word choice, useful idioms, etc). It'd also be great if my sentence was scored for 'natural-ness' -- how close was it to native speech? If this could be done regionally, that'd be better still (e.g. Spanish as spoken in Spain vs Mexico vs Argentina, etc). I'd also love to know what age level am I speaking at. A child? A teen? An adult? A more educated person? A professional author? Am I being ambiguous? Too direct? What is the tone I am using? Friendly? Demanding? Too formal? Culturally clueless? Improper to someone older or to the opposite sex? In fact, these same feedbacks could be really valuable even in your own native language. Learning how to communicate more clearly, precisely, positively, professionally, respectfully, literately, or even in a different style would be great practice to improve a person's basic communication skills in any language.
    • Quazel_S 4y ago
      We also see a lot of potential in giving the most precise feedback possible. In that way each individual learner can benefit the most. The development is currently on-going and we are looking forward to the next steps!
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    I really like this. Especially with the repetitions and automatically having the TTS be slower for beginners.
• mox111 4y ago
  This is really great and well executed. Well done! One problem I'm beginning to notice is that the connection to the realtime transcription is failing (I just see a loading screen when I click to reply). Maybe it's due to heavy load? I notice you are using Azure Cognitive Services for the transcription at the moment. Out of curiosity, did you consider any other services for this? (I'm building a transcription-based app myself and I'm worrying about the ability to handle lots of connections at once)
• htamas 4y ago
  I see there's Danish and Swedish. Are there any plans for adding Norwegian too?
• canMarsHaveLife 4y ago
  I see my native language (Brazilian Portuguese), but I don't see the language I want to learn (United States English).
• spookybones 4y ago
  Keyboard input isn’t working for me. (I can’t do audio at the moment.) I like the idea though.
  • LtWorf 4y ago
    No worries, audio isn't working for me. It just requests mic permission and spins forever. That's it.
• imdsm 4y ago
  Great idea but the microphone just wouldn't work for me. Also, in one statement, the AI chose a name that sounded like jirybadjirybadjirybadjirybadjirybadjirybad — repetitive. I'm not judging but I thought it was broken for a moment. Shame the microphone hangs.
• Hadjimina 4y ago
  I am literally sitting on the floor at the train station trying to fix the mic/loading bug, so bear with me here .
  • tmikaeld 4y ago
    Hint: Works if adblockers are disabled.
    • Hadjimina 4y ago
      yeah I think, it's a problem with mixpanel...but only on Firefox for some reason .
      • heliodor 4y ago
        Mic button shows a spinner in Chrome on Android.
    • saiya-jin 4y ago
      Not for me, tried this in latest Chrome and Firefox, disabling ublock and ghostery and still same behavior. Then once a bit later it worked with blockers on, but just first back & forth. I think the author underestimated the interest of folks in such a product and it may be having HN 'kiss of death'
      • Hadjimina 4y ago
        this kiss of death sounds ominous... The strange thing was I posted it to HN about 30days ago and got like 1 upvote. Obviously a lot has change since then, but still. I think the reason people like it so much is because you can try it without having to sign up first...not sure though.
        • saiya-jin 4y ago
          Sign-up would for sure ease up on load, but MAN you created (if it works at least on 90%) product that tons of people would kill for! Combine with stuff like Duolingo and one can cover significant parts of language. I've spent last year cca 5000$ on tons of conversation/grammar lessons via zoom to get to French B1 and do Swiss FIDE certificate, starting from very low A1 I would say. Given, the guy was properly good and he helped me to get better tremendously (and I got the cert). The biggest issue with language learning is finding a buddy that would not run away after few mins disgusted by my torture of language, as many french unfortunately do (tells you something about their school system and archaic language, but those are other topics for other places). I mean people in remote France offer this for something like 25 euro/hour. This tool may be perfect for that active part of learning, up to certain level I presume since I don't expect very high level finesse to be present (sorry I am a bit sceptic when it comes to AI/ML). This is the hardest part of learning // actively speaking, but also one where one grows the most.
• bobajeff 4y ago
  In my opinion the issue with most language programs is that they focus too early on speaking when listening should be the focus early on. Really speaking shouldn't even come into the picture until exposure of about a year and something like 15,000 hours of good comprehensible input.
  • Majestic121 4y ago
    That seems like an extremely inefficient way of learning a language, and does not match at all my experience nor the experience of the people I know fluent in multiple languages, and it seems to go straight against a common advice which is to speak and practice early and often, as 'producing' language is much more efficient to learn it than 'consuming' it. What makes you think 15000 hours of listening would improve anything, more than spending those 15000 hours on any other activity ? And do you have any specifics results that could give credit to your theory ? For reference, it is estimated that for hard languages, ~2200 hours of practice is required : https://linguapath.com/how-many-hours-learn-language/ https://linguapath.com/how-many-hours-learn-language/
    • ag315 4y ago
      No, bobajeff is correct. The vast majority of language acquisition occurs through input and exposure to the language via reading and listening. Trying to speak when you have no grasp yet of the grammar and vocabulary is not an efficient use of time, plus you don't have a good grasp of the sounds early on. You're better off gaining comprehension before you try to start speaking--if you actually look at the experiences of someone like Benny Lewis, who is well known for his "speak early and often" approach, you'll note that it was only effective for him with languages he already had a decent background with, or that were reasonably close to English.
    • knubie 4y ago
      This is a common misconception. It probably does not match your and others' experience simply because it is conventional wisdom, and most people are taught to do this. But just because most people do something a certain way does not make it the most efficient way. There are a number of reasons why you would want to focus on input early on. For starters, with very little exposure to a language, you have very little idea of what it is supposed to sound like. Not just pronunciation but word choice, grammar, and phrasing as well. So when outputting early you will make your best effort attempts, which are almost certainly going to be incorrect. Odds are these poor "best effort" attempts will stick as muscle memory and continue to be bad habits well into fluency, if you make it that far. I'm sure you've encountered many foreign speakers in English that are very fluent but have poor pronunciation or use incorrect grammar. I've never heard that "producing" a language is more efficient to learning it than "consuming" it. How can you learn anything by producing it without having "consumed" it first? That's not learning, that's inventing, and you don't want to be in the business of inventing language unless you're William Shakespeare. If you're interested in learning more about this idea, check out Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis [0]. In particular this quote from the Wikipedia article is salient: > Talking (output) is not practicing. Krashen stresses yet again that speaking in the target language does not result in language acquisition. Although speaking can indirectly assist in language acquisition, the ability to speak is not the cause of language learning or acquisition. Instead, comprehensible output is the effect of language acquisition. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis#Input_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis#Input_hypothe...
• harel 4y ago
  I was quite excited to try this out as this is the missing piece in apps like Duo Lingo. But as others noted - the Mic option did not work. It just keeps spinning awaiting my 'input'...
• hackarama 4y ago
  As a polyglot, and after playing around with a few of the supported languages, this is damned nifty!
• panda-giddiness 4y ago
  As someone who has been searching for something exactly like this, thank you so much!
• __jambo 4y ago
  This is interesting, but it's a tech solution that decreases person-to-person contact which is bad because isolation breeds hatred and anxiety. Just go talk to someone, there are so many people who want to do language exchanges. The problem with language learning is usually consistency and engagement/interest, you don't need tech. This app is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and that creates more problems. However, it is impressive and probably has application elsewhere. I think this should be pivoted to law, customer service some other target market.
  • f00zz 4y ago
    What? This is a conversation partner that's available 24/7, this is the dream app for any language learner.
    • iknownothow 4y ago
      Seconded, I want to speak openly without fear of judgement first with the AI so when I do speak to real people I'm much more confident. I know people who are confident/shameless (a positive trait in this case) who don't mind making mistakes when speaking to real people but that's not me. My only concern is how "correct" the tool or the AI is.
      • ivankelly 4y ago
        100% this. Children make mistakes all the time, but they're not afraid to, especially at the stage they're first acquiring the language. But by the time you're an adult, you're much more cautious about appearing dumb, so you hold back.
      • __jambo 4y ago
        You should work on your ability to act/speak in spite of the fear of making mistakes more than your skill. It is a fundamentally important property of society. We should not be afraid to even speak. Everyone has a different reality, mistakes are often highly relative. Richness of culture (and lack of political tyranny) comes from this interaction and lack of it is almost always bad.
• deleted 4y ago
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• wccrawford 4y ago
  I tried "兄弟は何人ですか？" (How many siblings do you have?) and it repeated it back to me, but said the translation was "I don't have any siblings."
• kleiba 4y ago
  This is a nice idea but unfortunately not for me: I'd feel uncomfortable sending recordings of my voice to some cloud service I have no trust in.
  • swyx 4y ago
    good thing it doesnt require login at all?
    • Rooster61 4y ago
      Yes, it does
• city17 4y ago
  It's impressive, the answers the AI gives are a lot more insightful than I expected. But they do seem somewhat isolated, in the sense that it can answer two questions about the same topic in a very different way, that are not logically consistent with each other. E.g. first I asked: What do you think about Famous Person X?, the AI answered 'He's great'. Then when a few seconds later I asked: 'Don't you think Famous Person X is [something bad]?', the AI answered that he completely agreed and gave reasons why he thinks this is the case. The answers in isolation seem very sensible, but the lack of consistency throughout the conversation as a whole can make it seem as if you're not talking to a real person.
  • rfrey 4y ago
    Given the goals of the AI,that seems like a very minor limitation... like you were in a language textbook and in page 34 Ricardo said he enjoys hot peppers but in page 72 he says spicy food upsets his stomach.
    • city17 4y ago
      Good point. It was just something I observed, and wondered if it was a common issue with these language AIs, or something specific to this one.
• willyt 4y ago
  Like the idea, but French in Safari doesn't seem to work either. Edit: When I click the microphone button I get a 'blip' noise and the button goes blue for a short while but nothing else happens and nothing is transcribed when I speak.
• bjt2n3904 4y ago
  Clever. But I'll never use it. AIs simply do not sound like people. They can fool me for a little while, but eventually you realize it's just a bot. But that's when I'm a native speaker. How will I be able to detect this when I struggle with the language? I can't help but think it's dangerous to give a non native speaker access to this, and lead them to believe they're learning to speak like a real person. They aren't -- they're learning to speak like GPT-2. The chief sin of AI is: this model is sufficiently close to a human. (How'd that work out for the resume filter? Or the AI responsible for setting bail?) The worse sin is teaching someone to emulate what the AI does. You take whatever biases the AI has, and encode it into a living, breathing person.
  • DoryMinh 4y ago
    who said it's going to replace human conversation? You can go to Italki and speaking to a person in any language with as little as 10$. It's a dream to all language learners to have safe practice environment. Your other arguments are the as same as those made with textbook which is rigid and "biased" by the authors.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    > AIs simply do not sound like people. They can fool me for a little while, but eventually you realize it's just a bot. Why would a language learner be concerned about that? If I thought it was a real person, I'd become alarmed, because that's not what it was presented to me as. > You take whatever biases the AI has, and encode it into a living, breathing person. Biases towards certain adjectives? I don't even understand this comment. It could lead you into speaking weird Spanish if it speaks weird Spanish, but I imagine that would be something they were trying to improve if they noticed it. And growing up in a weird place or having a weird family could also result in you speaking weird Spanish. You still speak Spanish, which is what language learners are looking for, and if you want to sound like a particular class of Spanish speaker, you would hang out with them and consume their media. I mean, my own English is pretty bad in my opinion, but it's a dream level for an aspiring language learner. Practicing their English with me would be useful, even if my speaking is somehow "biased." Are you telling me that language practice with an AI is worthless, or even a sin? I really don't understand a bit of this comment. So much so that I'm suspicious that it was generated by a model.
• OJFord 4y ago
  Since the 'please reach out to let us know a language you want isn't available' is just a mailto, hope you won't mind the feedback here that I'd love (and can imagine paying for) something like this for Hindi. Love the idea.
• beanjuiceII 4y ago
  using FF, doesn't work
• teddyh 4y ago
  This is a bit like the blind leading the blind – but it still might be better for students of English than what is available to them in their naitive country. C.f. “Engrish”, “Hinglish”, etc.
• PetrBrzyBrzek 4y ago
  It's super slow for me.
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    What device did you use and how was your internet connection? Still super early days so innefficiency in some parts of the code are to be expected. (TBH I am surprised that it still more or less works and did not completely crash)
• arriu 4y ago
  First, 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.
  • hoseja 4y ago
    I think it's "the space of possible answers" that's the struggle. It's hard not to start with a barbarian in a tavern and end up with a bunny space pirate in argentinian highschool in the space of five sentences.
  • wsgeorge 4y ago
    My feeling is companies don't invest in this because there isn't much return they expect from it. If gamers are more interested in playing with other humans than interacting with in-game characters, spending a lot on the AI to make it work might not make sense economically. I'm no insider, but I imagine the same sort of reasoning is applied to when companies don't invest enough in opponent AI to make them continuously competitive: people want to play with other humans. But I suspect this will change if it's marketed well. I will like to see that happen!
    • cbozeman 4y ago
      Let's found a startup, wsgeorge... Unreal Engine is popular because it removes the effort of designing and building a 3D engine from game creation (and it's my understanding that because it has fairly reasonable licensing agreement). PRATTLE, or Persistent Realistic AI for Talk and Text Language & Engagement, could be the Unreal Engine of procedurally generated NPC speech in games! And it already has a name... all we have to do is, you know... the hard work...
      • wsgeorge 4y ago
        Hah! Sounds like a plan! And I love that name ;)
• dark-star 4y ago
  At first I thought the "suggestions" for conversations are just predefined texts, but it seems they are also AI generated... It just suggested to talk about: "How will you two spend my weekend?" :-D
• vidbina 4y ago
  This is so dope. Wanted something like this for a while. Was about to ask about tips for folks trying to ease into a base-line language level and then started fiddling with the Translator feature (which wasn't superquick to spot but very helpful now). For the FAQ: How long have y'all been at it? Who is in the core team and what are your backgrounds? Would love to know the background story of the team. Just figured y'all are based out of ZH (ch) and SF (us) and noted the their.news submission but know nothing else. Super curious!
  • vidbina 4y ago
    Oh snap, when you sign up you get a learning track. This kicks DuoLingos ass. Like practical stuff (conversational aids) right away instead of useless practice sentences like "the monkey has a ball". In all fairness, I bailed on Duo about a year ago after a full year of maintaining a streak and feeling I wasn't learning much.
    • jacooper 4y ago
      Honestly Duolingo is one of the worst apps to learn a language after basic levels(A1). Its repetitive and slow. I switched to Seedlang(Learning Deustch) And its miles better, and this projects looks promising too! Although they cover different use cases.
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    Hi, so most of us are based in Zurich, but the project originally started while I was writing my master's thesis at UC Berkeley. Concreteley we are: Philipp (that's me, technical, https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmhadjimina/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmhadjimina/ ) David (technical, https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-niederberger-aba7a7177/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-niederberger-aba7a7177/) Sam (biz-wiz, https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-bissegger/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-bissegger/) and Gurnek (biz-wiz, https://www.linkedin.com/in/gurneksingh/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/gurneksingh/) Send me a DM on linkedin or at philipp@quazel.com Background wise David and I met in while doing CS in undergrad at ETH Zurich, I know Sam since highschool and met Gurnek at UC Berkeley. I have been working on Quazel fulltime for 1 week, before then I still had to finish my thesis (which was a pain in a*), but have been working on it for a few months before then just part time.
• swalsh 4y ago
  This would be awesome in VR. I took French in High School, and I forgot most of it, but after a week in France a lot of it was coming back. Immersion is a big deal in languages.
• amelius 4y ago
  Meanwhile there are millions of people in poor countries who would love to have a conversation with you in French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. over Skype.
  • bsaul 4y ago
    Poor countries people with a laptop, a descent internet connection for streaming, available at any time of the day instantly, and ready to have a 2 minutes stupid conversation about anything random ? Not so sure ..
    • telesilla 4y ago
      >Poor countries people with a laptop With an android phone >a descent internet connection for streaming Lots of free public WiFi spots and cafes >available at any time of the day instantly Why instantly? Uber-style, whoever is around >ready to have a 2 minutes stupid conversation about anything random Script it
    • missedthecue 4y ago
      Italki is pretty close... I know some people in my country who make some money this way. You're right that nothing beats the convenience of the AI, but real people have other certain advantages.
  • telesilla 4y ago
    Sounds like an opportunity to build a business?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • amelius 4y ago
      Yes, there are also millions of lonely elderly who would love to speak to someone.
      • 4y ago
• _iyhy 4y ago
  No English?
  • davidatbu 4y ago
    Through I'm not an ESL learner, I'm willing to bet that this (learning/practicing English) is where most of the demand is in the world!
• swyx 4y ago
  am rusty chinese speaker. randomly assigned to converse on Furniture & Locations. --- Quazel: 告诉我吧!你是如何安排你的家具的？ Me (in halting, broken chinese): 窗户旁边有一个沙发，中间是电视和桌子。我的工作就是在这里. Quazel: 所以你的沙发是面向窗户的？那真的很好。我敢打赌，这样你会得到很多自然光。沙发后面是什么呢？ translated Quazel: How do you arrange your furniture? Me: There is a couch next to the window, with a TV and table in the middle. This is where I work. Quazel: So you have your couch facing the window? That's really nice. I bet you get a lot of natural light that way. And what is behind the couch? --- holy. shit. its like a very very patient language teacher who doesnt judge you, who understands objects and context.
  • panda_2134 4y ago
    Native Chinese speaker here. While Quazel has shown ability in understanding the context, its Chinese is not as authentic as that of a real teacher. Grammatically correct, but sounds weird. (for example, the phrase "I bet" is rarely used in Chinese) Maybe the weirdness is an innate characteristic of machine translation, so I'm not being too harsh here. But IMO it cannot take the place of a human teacher (at least now).
    • swyx 4y ago
      yea i think there's some unnecessary english intermediary layer here. starting a sentence with 所以 for "So" was a telltale sign to me as well. i suspect it goes chinese prompt -> english prompt -> english response -> chinese response rather than the more direct chinese prompt -> chinese response which would eliminate those translated englishisms. but i gotta say as someone who doesnt like people waiting for me to come up with words, this beats a human teacher for the basic activation of neural pathways for vocab
    • Hadjimina 4y ago
      Yeah some languages work better than others...keep in mind this is the earliest usable version. Will definelty keep that in mind
  • treis 4y ago
    It's interesting that you got a deeper conversation. Mine was (in spanish): Me: How are you? Q: I am well Me: What do you do? Q: I am an engineer Me: What kind of engineer? Q: I am a civil engineer That's when I got the pay/subscription wall.
• simedw 4y ago
  After transcribing the speech into text, it seems to first translate it into English before send it over the GPT-3 (davinci). I wonder if that will lead to a bunch of mistakes, can't GPT-3 handle Mandarin directly? I did some experiments and using the same prompt but without translating it seem to lead to better results.
• Technologyc 4y ago
  First of all, let me say it is a great bot and I adore it. Gratitude for creating this.
• dominotw 4y ago
  I was skeptical but wow this is amazing. I am curious about the set of technologies you've used to build this. great work!
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    Thanks we really appreciate it!
• bsaul 4y ago
  Absolutely outstanding. Small request: for japaneese, it would be great to include a japaneese phonetic transcription of the text in western alphabet. It would help distinguish words and make it easier to learn new vocabulary..
  • swyx 4y ago
    another small feedback, would be good to be able to tune the speaking rate, the default speed is pretty fast
    • bsaul 4y ago
      there's a snail icon you can use to have it speak slowly
    • jinto36 4y ago
      There's a "snail" icon in the text bubble that pronounces it again, but slower. At least for me, in Firefox.
  • loxias 4y ago
    This! I could really use more info. A phonetic transliteration for all languages (esp Mandarin and Japanese...) as well as a sort of "bouncing ball" indicating what word is being said. This is _so cool_ for an MVP. Perhaps in the beginning, it could even accept English speech and reply in the language of choice -- it's easier to build recognition first. On the whole, fantastic work. I'm curious about the audio processing backend, (and if you could use some help in that area ;-).
    • Quazel_S 4y ago
      Thank you very much! We also think about implementing a phonetic tranliteration. This could be especially helpful for unrelated (to mother tongue) languages.
• outime 4y ago
  Pretty cool. Special thanks for offering Finnish.
• madmod 4y ago
  As someone who is studying Japanese intensely with a tutor this is absolutely perfect for me! Being able to do some speaking and listening practice instantly at any time is exactly what I need! A few feature requests: - save conversations and come back to them - history of past conversations - auto speak the sentence - larger buttons particularly for the microphone
  • Quazel_S 4y ago
    Thank you for your positive feedback! We're currently working on implementing the features you mentioned!
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    - Noted - Noted - Not 100% sure what you mean with that. So, you want to automatically speak a sentence that you enter in translator? The normal messages you get from the AI, should already be spoken automatically (though I had to implement a hack on safari, b.c. you can't automatically play audio there) - Noted
    • madmod 4y ago
      The mobile safari hack may not be working for me. I’m on the latest iOS and had the issue in the browser and in the PWA home screen version. It might be an issue with the first sentence only but I haven't tested enough to be sure.
• biztos 4y ago
  I tried out Hungarian — I speak it well but have an accent — and it got some parts wrong in the transcription that a human speaker would definitely understand. A second try was better but not quite 100% and I do worry about edge cases with languages that might have less training data or less precise classification. Also for Hungarian the response was a bit weird, though on topic. I was using Google (via some speech to text notebook web app) to practice Thai pronunciation and had the opposite problem, where the machine understood when I’m pretty sure my pronunciation was bad enough an average Thai would not understand me. That said, I would absolutely pay for something like this if it covered the language I’m trying to learn, even if imperfectly. And at least for beginners, forcing you to speak plainly is not necessarily a bad thing. Any plans for pricing? Subscription or by use or…?
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    we do have some plans but nothing finalised yet. We actually removed the stripe implementation because we want to publish it as a PWA on appstores. For pricing we would probably go the subscription route. An other idea we had was for an ad-based service (I also hate ads so give me a sec to explain): When you talk to a friend about movies you are currently watching, the might recommend a good movie they just saw on netflix. Now in our case we could have recommendations like that but they would be ads. Obviously you don't want to be spammed by ads in every conversations and it's going to be tricky how they come across. Do you think something like that would be greepy or ok? Or would you say it's better to have it a premium subscription based service? We are trying to figure this stuff out ourselves atm...
    • biztos 4y ago
      I think the problem with ads based on the conversations is twofold: 1. Whatever you do to make it work for useful ads ("Oh, you like Goddard? Check this out on Netflix...") could also be super creepy ("Oh, you have ED? So sorry, have you tried Superdrug?") and I don't think there's any way you're going to know ahead of time. As a techie sure I see how it would be cool to have the "AI" just "say the ad" but... at least be very, very selective about what can be advertised. 2. If it works, it'll be a slippery slope. First it's our conversation about the movies, then it's movie mentions our previous conversations, eventually it's all our conversations ever, dumped into another AI to target the ads -- at which point, Facebook buys you I guess, so there's that. If I were you I'd target the education market, make it subscription based, offer some kind of big-ish discount for public schools, and also offer some kind of specific features for language schools. For instance my teachers give me homework, why not have them seed your program with some key phrases I need to practice? Anyway, data point of one, but if it had an iPhone app and Thai was an option, I'd pay $10/mo without thinking about it.
• DonCullen 4y ago
  As I’m completely deaf and don’t really use my voice, I communicate via ASL and via written English. This looks like a great tool but falls short in allowing the non-verbal to type to converse instead of speaking.
  • IHLayman 4y ago
    I think there’s a typing option: just click on the keyboard icon when entering a conversation?
• motohagiography 4y ago
  One wonders whether using it will give me an AI accent in the language I learn? What a brilliant idea.
• rychco 4y ago
  This looks great. How have you decided on what languages to add? What other languages will you consider in the future?
• job977 4y ago
  What about english ? i speak spanish natively and try to learn english
• Hadjimina 4y ago
  If y'all want to get in touch say hi at philipp@quazel.com
  • cbozeman 4y ago
    How do we send you money? I saw it mentioned on the site, but didn't really see a way to do so, or I either missed it. Duolingo, Mango, Babbel, blah blah other language learning apps / software runs anywhere from $2.99 to $14.99 a month. Live tutors / lessons vary greatly, but Babbel Live is $75 to $150 a month depending on what length of time you're willing to pre-pay. For in-person one-on-one lessons, I've seen a price of $10 an hour on iTalki for a Spanish professor in Medellín, Colombia to instruct you. If you figure 1-2 hours per week, that's $40 - $80 per month, and that'd be considered a "light" load. While writing this, it did occur to me that your app / AI / ML model / whatever label you want to put on it will put a lot of tutors out of business (as how you do compete with a natural language model that's available 24/7?), but I think the overall good to humanity is worth it, and as always, the cream of the crop will rise to the top anyway. What's your long-term plan with Quazel? There's no wrong answer here, insofar as I'm personally concerned. "I want to make enough money to quit my day job by leveraging this into a SaaS offering.", "I want to sell out for $50 million ASAP and go live on a small yacht in the Caribbean.", "I want to hit a billion dollar valuation in 6 months and totally reinvent language learning.", "I just wanted to improve the way we learn languages online, bro..." They're all good goals to me, I'm just curious what sparked this.
• DoryMinh 4y ago
  in an app like this, you should be transparent about whether you store users' data
• gregsadetsky 4y ago
  Really great work, congrats! I asked the AI about a painter, it immediately responded with "oh yes I know him, I love his pictures". I told him about my job, it said something relevant ("I love computers too"). Ha! Really impressive & great. Congrats on the launch! Really awesome work. Micro bug report: clicking "Install Quazel" shows a dialog with a small 404 icon/image. Cheers
  • Quazel_S 4y ago
    Many thanks for your feedback! We're still in a relatively early stage, which explains the bugs. We'll take care of the one you mentioned asap.
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    dope thanks!
• jinto36 4y ago
  Hi, I'm just wondering what the text-to-speech and speech-to-text for Japanese is based on? It works pretty well, and speech-to-text in a browser is not something I thought would be practical a few years ago. How much of that is being done client-side? Also like others I recognize some of the "voices" from Duolingo, so presumably there's some text-to-speech engine in common? The prompt/scene generator is amusing.
• xiphias2 4y ago
  I tried the Spanish version, and it looks fun to talk to, but I would prefer to practice with Latin Spanish accent, which is different from Spain.
  • regularfry 4y ago
    I'm the reverse. Duolingo Spanish is Latin, but I'm far more likely to actually need conversational Spanish in Spain.
• throwaway743 4y ago
  Any plans for Korean?
  • Quazel_S 4y ago
• Gm0pzTeS6IRYp8W 4y ago
  You desperately need a privacy policy when you process sensitive data. At least name the companies the data is send to.
• bhu1st 4y ago
  Congrats on the launch. How do you add support for new language? If any human input is required in adding a new language get in touch for Nepali.
• jcims 4y ago
  Possibly related, I really think a tool like this could be immensely useful in picking up speech and reading impediments early in the development process. May also be able to help measure progress of therapy and training.
• esrh 4y ago
  I'm stunned by how well this works for Japanese, the only language I think I'm good enough at to judge the AI's responses. The speech recognition is flawless as far as I can tell. The AI occasionally gets itself into a loop of repeating my question or itself, but I think this has been a problem with a lot of chatbots. The only glaring errors I've seen so far are these kinds of AI-specific issues, like forgetting context, getting geographical facts wrong, etc. >こんにちは。今日はどちらへお出かけですか？ (Hello. Where are you headed?) 京都に行きます. (I'm going to Kyoto) >素晴らしい都市ですね。行ったことはありますか？ (It's a great city. Have you been?) いや初めてです。お勧めの場所はありますか？. (Nope, it's my first time. Any places you suggest?) >京都は歴史のある美しい都市です。たくさんのお寺や神社を訪れることができます。(Kyoto is a beautiful city with history. You can visit plenty of temples and shrines.) そうですね。清水寺とか聞いたことがある。行きたいんだ. (True. I've heard of like, Kiyomizudera, and I want to go.) >清水寺は必見です！とても人気のあるお寺で、市内を一望できるんですよ(Kiyomizudera is a must-see! It's a very popular temple, and you can see the whole area at once) Not only does it know about Kyoto, but it knows about a specific temple (picked it up via speech recognition too). Translations are rough and by me, not quazel. This could be a real game changer if the other languages are this good. Additionally, if you register an account then you get access to the "Scene builder" which lets you set up a situation to start the conversation in. I have found that you can redirect any conversation to pretty much anything, but I thought it was a cool idea that many people here averse to account-making might have missed.
  • jonpurdy 4y ago
    If it's that good with Japanese, I'd love to see it support Korean! Keeping up conversational practice is very tough as a non-native speaking not living in Korea anymore. So having an AI that I can bother at my convenience would be amazing.
    • clairity 4y ago
      korean would be great, as it's a language i've tried learning in the past. i sometimes watch k-dramas and can understand about 20-30%, but would love to practice at my leisure so that i can understand more without reading the subtitles constantly. i've watched enough wuxia/xianxia now to recognize about 10% of the mandarin words/phrases, but have almost no understanding of the grammar. the real key to learning seems to be (going through the often frustrating process of) communicating in real time, not just reading and listening.
• Hadjimina 4y ago
  @Everyone: We are absoluteley stunned by your response. We have been working on this for a few months now and just posted it here on a whim not expecting much and are absoluteley blow away by your response. The bugs and crashes are somewhat to be expected but even those don't seem to be mission critical (or has some discovered one? => philipp@quazel.com) Your responses will help us imensley getting into an accelerator program. We might reach out to some of you for further feedback (feel free to ignore us if you don't feel like giving any).
• Tycho 4y ago
  It would be cool to have a sort of smart home where you can activate an immersive language teaching mode where it will talk to you as you move around the house, naming things you interact with or prompting you for instructions, so that you just naturally before conversant without devoting time to dedicated lessons and practice.
• deckeraa 4y ago
  Very cool. I think a tool like this could be useful for learning "dead" languages like Latin where it can be hard to find speakers. (Assuming of course that you're still able to train a language model in the language).
• gusfrehse 4y ago
  Really nice, but ugh... it doesn't have english?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• crazygringo 4y ago
  I 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 be fairly disastrous, particularly with short snippets of conversational text. (In contrast, machine translation does best with long sentences of highly technical writing.) So the concept is very intriguing, but the problem is that it needs to rely on native language models per-language. (Or if it already is, then those models need a vastly better or larger training corpus.) So A+ for proof of concept, but I'd never recommend anybody practice with this in order to learn/practice a language, because with the quality where it is, it will make you a worse speaker -- not better. The things it says are just too weird.
  • englishrookie 4y ago
    Based on just a few exchanges in Dutch (I'm a native speaker), I'd say it's pretty good. The conversation sounds pretty natural (albeit shallow). Maybe the quality differs per language?
    • Agentlien 4y ago
      I tried it out in both Dutch (fluent) and Swedish (native speaker). The Dutch seemed fine. In Swedish most of it was perfectly ordinary Swedish except one response seemed like awkwardly translated English.
    • Hadjimina 4y ago
      Yeah it's highly dependent on the language right now
    • Quazel_S 4y ago
      Yes exactly. Currently there are slight quality differences depending on the chosen language. We're working on improvements in all languages.
• throwaway2203 4y ago
  What's the AI engine behind the scenes? I would love to see Arabic or Urdu on there!
• jacooper 4y ago
  What data is collected through the service?
• thedebuglife 4y ago
  It works quite well for Dutch (a relatively small language) both in speech recognition and responses. Well done! It’s a cool project. Lots of people here like to nitpick but I’m sure this wasn’t easy.
• nextstep 4y ago
  It makes you create an account mid conversation? That’s a dark pattern.
• Rooster61 4y ago
  Multiple people have pointed out in here have asked about a privacy policy or where this information is going. Considering this doesn't work without having to create an account, you need to provide some information about how people's inputs are being recorded, how it's used, and who it's sent to. This is a dark pattern and it's disconcerting that people's questions are going unanswered, especially since you mentioned that you would be seeking an accelerator for this project.
• snuns 4y ago
  I love the product! There are a lot of people that are too shy to talk to others while learning a new language. This seems like a good way to start talking in a "secure" environment. Also, you should add english language! It is being learned by 1 billion people as a second language and probably it would be a lot easier to make a great model in english. If I were you, I would nail english language first and after that focus on adding more languages. Anyway, great product!!!
• no_circuit 4y ago
  Congrats on getting your project in front of everyone! Among many side projects I've never gotten around to start on, or past the hook up APIs stage, this concept is one of them. I suspect that is using one of the off the shelf NLP chat bots and speech recognition, perhaps from a platform like Hugging Face, since you are allowed to chat about anything you want and have a dozen or so languages enabled. While really cool, as others have pointed out in complex responses received, I suspect it is a long way for being useful to a language learner because the user has no way of knowing if what the chatbot is saying makes any sense. For example I used keyboard entry to speak in Japanese with it. The bot said hello and asked my name. I replied with my name in katakana and the desu (I am fragment) in hiragana. The bot responded in a way that just smashed those together as my name grammatically which is incorrect. Perhaps the language models can get so good some day one could just prompt a model to "teach me Japanese through conversation from the beginning", but for now I think it is difficult enough to make an engine for a single language pair. If one is far enough along in a language to be conversational, it is low-cost, or even free, to find an actual language exchange conversation partner.
• e12e 4y ago
  This looks really neat. But there's a wrong conjugation in the tag-line: "talk you(sic) way to fluency" (should be "talk your way to... ").
• drumttocs8 4y ago
  Super cool- but for me, the "default" Spanish was way too fast, and the the "slow" was way too slow. Can we have a speed slider or something?
• mtgx 4y ago
• pmarreck 4y ago
  It's a great idea, I tried it in German (fairly fluent) and it seemed pretty legit. But I'm guessing you're at the 90% completion point and that last 10% will require another 200% effort from you guys... What do you use for speech synthesis? I have a little side project I'm investigating text-to-speech engines for (aiming for as much realism as possible, at least in English, plus the ability to possibly modify errant pronunciation somehow, and add pauses of varying length)
• lazylion2 4y ago
  Works great with Russian! Would suggest to set the bot to communicate with the "T–V distinction" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction for example instead of Ты (you singular) it should say вы (you plural) Duolingo explains: Russian makes a distinction between ты, singular "you", and вы, plural "you". The latter also doubles for "polite" you, with verbs also in plural. And don't forget that the "excuse" in "Excuse me" is a verb! Use ты with friends and your family members Use вы with adult strangers, your teachers and in other formal interactions (at the store, doctor's, airport etc.) People use вы with those who are much older. Nobody is "polite" toward kids.
• Hasz 4y ago
  Hey, this is very cool. However, the service seems to be wilting under load -- I signed in with google, chose chinese, and am doing the first module. A simple 你好, 我叫<name> hasn't garnered a repsonse in ~15 minutes. The trial seems to work OK though.
• davidf18 4y ago
• Hadjimina 4y ago
• alex_35 4y ago
  Defintely something that is better than studying grammar !
• bradfitz 4y ago
  Tried it in German. Me: "Wie heißt du?" (What's your name?) It: "Tut mir leid, was?" (Sorry, what?) Not a great first impression.
  • Quazel_S 4y ago
• belkarx 4y ago
  I asked it about the properties of water and it went on a rant about how that's subjective and depends on what you want to talk about. But was solid in the beginning. Feature request: Allow you to switch between written and verbal modes once you've loaded the chat interface. Right now you need to reload everything to switch modes.
  • Quazel_S 4y ago
• mesozoic 4y ago
  It seems to have no memory after I explained that I was a cheese taco that can only be heard by them they can't continue the conversation contextually.
• spullara 4y ago
  If you aren't already using OpenAI Whisper for this, you should probably try it.
• kebsup 4y ago
  Funny thing, my friend and I just built a very similar app: https://blabot.app https://blabot.app It's a bit more minimalistic though.
  • Hadjimina 4y ago
    Maybe we can have a chat? Would be cool. philipp@quazel.com
• ravenstine 4y ago
  I've been really looking for something like this! Every language learning app I've tried bored the hell out of me because of the lack of actual conversational practice. What would be cool is if this eventually could work in a way that incorporates both languages (ex. Spanglish) and gradually shifts into the full foreign language over time.
• teabee89 4y ago
  I tried Hungarian. For the 3rd response it switched to Spanish, but with a Hungarian accent which was amusing but I'm not sure that was the intention :D
• outside1234 4y ago
  The robot voice is not super compelling, but I like how it gives you a sparring partner to practice speaking with, even if it doesn't correct you.
• aecs99 4y ago
  Amazing idea and execution. If you don’t mind revealing, can you describe the ML components in the background? Model, data trained on, etc.? Thanks and good luck!
• trafnar 4y ago
  I love this concept but it would be much more fluid if my message would auto-send without having to click. Also the voice (I used mandarin) sounds robotic, the microsoft azure voices sound amazing (you can try them here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cognitive-services/text-to-speech/#features https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cognitive-service...)
• missedthecue 4y ago
  This is an interesting tool. I did not encounter any awkward grammatical sentences that other posters did. But the conversation I had got really repetitive. This was my conversation (spanish). AI: So why are you in the park? Me: I'm here because I like to exercise AI: That's great! I like to exercise too! What is your favorite type of exercise? Me: I like to run AI: That's great! I like to run too! What is your favorite route to run? Me: I favorite place to run is on the Malecón. AI: That's great! I like to run on the Malecón too! When do you run? Me: I run in the evenings or at night. AI: That's great! I love to run at night too. I suppose I could have been a better conversationalist, but the AI logic used to ask questions deserves tweaking.
  • moffkalast 4y ago
    That's great! I like to have better AI logic too.
  • LouisSayers 4y ago
    It might be because the AI is lonely - they spend a lot of time asking others about themselves, but who's caring about the AI? You never asked them about themselves, their interests or anything... If it was a real person they probably would have said "have a nice day!" And left you in the park.
• WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  I didn't see an English version. There are many people that will find that one useful.
• fpierfed 4y ago
  I tried in Italian. Speech to text is impressive: kudos. The conversation was definitely weird and very repetitive. It needs more work I think. In any case, great idea and I am sure that you will soon enough get a fantastic product out.
  • LimitedInfo 4y ago
    sei italiano? pensato che la conversazione era buona ma io ho solo studiato l'italiano da 6 mesi.
• herval 4y ago
  Tried Brazilian Portuguese - the accent is spot on, but the wording is completely off (reads a bit like Portuguese from Portugal). Great starting point though!
• sleight42 4y ago
  Here I was, hoping to find Klingon as an option.
• gxh8N 4y ago
  This is amazing. German and Bulgarian are great.
• radiojasper 4y ago
  I tried Spanish, it gave me a sentence and I had no idea what it meant so I replied ay tío, no entiendo nada! and it actually explained to me in simpler terms what it meant. Pretty good!
• wunderbaba 4y ago
  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.
• dkaleta 4y ago
  Some 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.
  • Tepix 4y ago
    > It is really difficult to speak for hours to a machine that doesn't express any emotions and is not excited about anything. I spoke few french phrases with it and it explained to me why it loves french.
• jcpst 4y ago
  Maybe 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.
• yamrzou 4y ago
  No arabic?
• godelski 4y ago
  This seems really cool. Even though there are clearly some flaws, the most important thing for learning to speak a language is simply the act of speaking and listening. There's some key points of advice I'd give: - Allow multiple languages under an account. People that learn languages tend to learn more than one. I'd personally like to practice my Spanish AND Chinese. - Forget the lessons (for now at least. You're jumping in too fast and even the basic lesson requires quite a large barrier to entry). Make an easy way to just get to the chat in a specific language. That's the greatest utility of the tool, make it shine. - There's also some ease of use things like lack of pinyin/latinization for some languages. Or like not being able to delete your message when in the translation (and that pressing the record again appends instead of rewrites). But this all seems like it'll be worked out by dogfooding. Great job though! I'm excited to use it and have already shared with a few friends. As a (CV) ML researcher, I'm curious what backends you're using and your control flow.
• monopoliessuck 4y ago
  This is great. I encountered a few bugs, but overall this was just fun to use. I particularly liked getting this prompt a few volleys in. The AI decided she was done with speaking Spanish... except, not really. > her (translated): Wow, I'm sorry, I don't understand Spanish that well. Do you mind if we speak in English? > me (translated): No that's fine, let's speak in English please. > her: Me llamo Sarah y soy de Estados Unidos. Tengo dos gatos a los que quiero mucho. En mi tiempo libre, me gusta leer y hacer senderismo. ¿Y tú?
• ninjabeans 4y ago
  You have to log in after 3-4 phrases? Why even bother making this whole thing if you just want to prevent people from experiencing it?
• tidenly 4y ago
  Ran into a problem immediately in Japanese. I asked お名前は何と言いますか？(Whats your name?) and it correctly said Sarah, but then when I asked 何人（なに人）ですか？(Where are you from?) the transcription into kanji caused the なにじん(nanijin) to be interpreted as the most common way to read those kanji なんにん(nanninn). So she responded to the question "How many people are there?" with "There are 6 people in my office". I don't know how easily fixable this is. Either context needs to be taken into account, or the original phonetic transcription should be kept underneath the kanji.
• amatecha 4y ago
  Cool idea!! I'm just trying it now with French. It asked me where I want to travel, so I said Paris, then I said I love Lyon too. Then it said "have you had a chance to visit?" ... well, duh. I tried to write a response in English and then translate that to French (because I don't know how to say "yes, that's why I said I love it" in French) but that doesn't seem to work, and the app is kinda frozen up now. I can see a console log twice "send w.o. punctuation" , but I'm not sure if that's related (I did try to translate my English to French twice)... BTW I see a ton of network errors trying to hit Mixpanel. I hope your code is written such that Mixpanel calls aren't blocking calls, because tracker-blocking behaviour in Firefox or other browsers will stop those services *such as Mixpanel or GA) from loading.
• peterhung 4y ago
  It's a cool tool. But for serious learning, and from a more padegogical perspective, it's hard to tell when the AI starts to go off the rails.
• deleted 4y ago
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• kingofkyiv 4y ago
• ibdf 4y ago
  I tried it in Brazilian Portuguese and it was a bit weird (my native language)... then I tried in Italian (language I'm learning) and it was much better...nonetheless, this is a really neat application.
• Tepix 4y ago
  This is nice, but sooner rather than later it's highly advisable to talk to real people for practice. There are apps like Tandem that make it easy to find someone for language practice online 24/7.
• barbariangrunge 4y ago
  In the long run, this sounds great; today, I'm... skeptical. The sorts of nonsense that come out of some of these machine learning algorithms is sometimes subtle, and you could really confuse a newcomer to a language in ways that could mislead them about how grammar works in the new language. This as a peer-to-peer service, between advanced and junior students of the language, might be a neat service