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Very cool can’t wait to try it. I’m curious about offering Bosnian which basically no language apps do. Was it just easy to offer or is there more of a connect

Very cool can’t wait to try it. I’m curious about offering Bosnian which basically no language apps do. Was it just easy to offer or is there more of a connection. My wife is Bosnian and I have learned some over the years.

mbmjertan 3y ago
Unfortunately speech recognition is very poor for Bosnian, and that seems to be the case here as well. I am not sure how usable it is for the described use case is, but given that it didn't understand 3/3 of my sentences at all, I wouldn't hold my breath yet.
fabiensnauwaert 3y ago
I added Bosnian because of a trip I took a couple of months ago (big on using my own product to learn more languages – "eat your own dog food" kinda way .) How do you feel about your pronunciation of Bosnian? Could you get your wife to try it? How The elephant in the room with language education is that it's tough to learn clear pronunciation even though it's super useful. Things get a bit messed up with speech recognition: 1. Speech recognition is designed to understand no matter what (which is kinda stupid – in natural language when things are incomprehensible [because of noise, lack of context, mispronunciation, or whatever we just ASK people to repeat] 2. Speech recognition is trained on native speakers most of the time. But it would make sense to do two opposite things: 1) train it on non-native speakers as well (to improve performance), things are getting there… 2) train it to correct non-native speakers (some projects in that direction too, mostly for English.) I'll add my own layer of checks to handle such cases. So that when speech recognition goes wrong (as it inevitably will – with HIGH variability between different contexts and speakers) the teacher does not get off track because of it. Sorry this got so long! Thank you for sharing your feedback :)

mbmjertan 3y ago

Unfortunately speech recognition is very poor for Bosnian, and that seems to be the case here as well. I am not sure how usable it is for the described use case is, but given that it didn't understand 3/3 of my sentences at all, I wouldn't hold my breath yet.

fabiensnauwaert 3y ago

I added Bosnian because of a trip I took a couple of months ago (big on using my own product to learn more languages – "eat your own dog food" kinda way .) How do you feel about your pronunciation of Bosnian? Could you get your wife to try it? How The elephant in the room with language education is that it's tough to learn clear pronunciation even though it's super useful. Things get a bit messed up with speech recognition: 1. Speech recognition is designed to understand no matter what (which is kinda stupid – in natural language when things are incomprehensible [because of noise, lack of context, mispronunciation, or whatever we just ASK people to repeat] 2. Speech recognition is trained on native speakers most of the time. But it would make sense to do two opposite things: 1) train it on non-native speakers as well (to improve performance), things are getting there… 2) train it to correct non-native speakers (some projects in that direction too, mostly for English.) I'll add my own layer of checks to handle such cases. So that when speech recognition goes wrong (as it inevitably will – with HIGH variability between different contexts and speakers) the teacher does not get off track because of it. Sorry this got so long! Thank you for sharing your feedback :)