6 ms·
English learners can now practice speaking on Google Search
- lxgr 3y agoReally cool, but why on earth is this in Google Search and not Translate?!
- nicce 3y agoTo get wider audience? Don’t know why they want that. Some audio data collecting?
- hulitu 3y agoYes. They want all of your data.
- lupire 3y agoSearch, Assistant, Google, Gemini, ... It's all gSiri
- notarealllama 3y ago"Do one thing well", a common Linux design philosophy, was blatantly ignored here. Search is not the place for this, sibling comment is likely right about trying to reach wider audience. Claude.ai and chatGPT have become my go to for translation over Google Translate, they provide better idiomatic context. They aren't perfect for code, but I can chat with them in target languages (outside of English) and they're pretty fluent.
- righthand 3y agoIt’s Unix, not Linux, philosophy fyi: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
- wudangmonk 3y agoIts Linux's philosophy now, rip Unix.
- refulgentis 3y agostares at Terminal.app
- jeffbee 3y agoBetter question is why the Google app exists. It's just a platform for kitchen sink projects that they could not be bothered to wrap a whole app around.
- sfmike 3y agoBecause google will a/b test(maybe unintentionally) products and eventually kill or merge them, great example now is using voice to have google help you vs gemini essentially both voice helpers.
- Vox_Leone 3y agoAdditional data points. Now Google also knows your vocal profile and any subtle stress factors -- or lack thereof -- emerging in the context of each topic/theme used in your practicing, as well as your proficiency level and your learning rate. Not bad.
- duringmath 3y agoAnd what's the commercial application of all this stressed syllable data?
- codetrotter 3y agoCross-device tracking
- duringmath 3y agoBut you're already logged in, and if you're not well that defeats the purpose.
- zipping1549 3y agoTargeted ads
- codetrotter 3y agoTargeted ads like the other guy said, and I also want to say specifically that that is useful to Google both for users who are signed out, and users who have separate personal accounts on their different devices, and also useful because they can figure out the same person using a device and account issued from their work and using a personal account on their personal device is the same person. For example at my job we have a work-issued Google account that I use on the work laptop for their Gmail and Google Calendar. And on my phone I am signed in to Google with my personal account because I use YouTube on my phone.
- duringmath 3y ago
- atum47 3y agoIn a way, I've been using Google tools to improving my english for a while now. A while back I was way more active on youtube, recording videos of my projects speaking english. I would then see the auto generated captions to see if the model had some trouble understanding what I was saying. Most of the time it was ok. Since I saw the model misunderstanding native english speakers as well.
- hu3 3y agoThat's one way to gather massive amounts of high quality audio data to train their own Whisper AI. I like it. It's a win win in my book.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- daniel_reetz 3y agoExactly as they did with GOOG-411, which was used to build a huge phoneme database. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
- zamadatix 3y agoFascinating. I had only ever used the SMS version so that the whole thing was really centered around collecting voice samples is a double surprise to me.
- jeffbee 3y agoWhy would you want to collect training data from English learners?
- lb4r 3y agoBecause a lot of English is spoken by non-native speakers.
- plastic_bag 3y agoTrue. The exact ratio is three non-native speakers to one native speaker.
- walkerbrown 3y agoImproved transcription accuracy from non-native English I bet.
- mhh__ 3y ago
- alanzhuly 3y agoBeautiful, practice acting when?
- anArbitraryOne 3y agoI used to use google's voice recognition a lot when learning Chinese. I would whip myself when it didn't understand me. So my horrible pronunciation is probably in the training data.
- kebsup 3y agoI'm considering adding a similar kind of practice to my vocabulary learning app: https://vocabuo.com https://vocabuo.com Translating sentences is problematic, because they can often include other words that users don't know and there are often many possible translations, which is difficult to check. The task "say a sentence using the word [word]" and then correcting the sentence using some LLM seems like a very promising, especially when combined with spaced-repetition flashcards.
- FredPret 3y agoLove this. I tried something similar with Google Translate, but for a different language. I'd attempt to say a phrase in my target language and see if it translates to what I was trying to say in English.
- behnamoh 3y agoWhat is its inevitable shut down deadline?
- xyst 3y ago2026-06-09
- keybored 3y agoI personally attribute very little of my English learning to formal learning. And even less to speaking English. My history as I understand it: I watched TV shows, played games, watched movies. Eventually I would write to other people on the Internet. I guess I was fourteen. Note that I made the jump to writing (“talking”) to people about something I was interested in (music) instead of seeking out English communication for its own sake. Only as an adult in a very International setting (a local sport with many foreigners) did I discover that I sucked at speaking the language. But getting good at speaking it then only took tens of hours at the most. Then it would feel as effortless as writing it. I’m trying to learn a language now (after failing to learn another language ten years ago) and I’m taking a similar approach: exposure to lots of input (cf. “output” like writing/talking) and trying to remember words with retrieval practices like flashcards. It will be hundreds of hours until I try to speak anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis
- greatgib 3y agoI saw a language speaking quizz test in my replies to a Google search with the browser. Not in app. Probably part of an a/b testing. And was a little bit pissed off to have my search results space wasted with a stupid widget I didn't ask for and out of the blue.