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My first language is Afrikaans, which is a somewhat niche language and hard to find teachers/conversation buddies outside South Africa. (I live in USA now) I'v
by jeanbza 17d ago
My first language is Afrikaans, which is a somewhat niche language and hard to find teachers/conversation buddies outside South Africa. (I live in USA now)
I've been using Gemini to live chat in Afrikaans and do impromptu Afrikaans grammar lessons during my solo drives around town. It is phenomenal at speaking the language - like, it really shocks my family members when they hear it.
This is probably the most joy I get from any of my usages of LLMs/AIs. It's been really, really nice getting to speak my language regularly again. =)
So, I'm excited about this release and live chat getting better. I also hope the other frontier labs pick up niche languages like this as well so that I have more options.
- arnorhs 17d agoYeah Gemini has been consistently better than open ai's chat in icelandic, but I would still say it's far from passable as natural sounding. Lots of grammar errors and the pronunciation sounds like a non native speaker.
- trollbridge 17d agoMakes sense as the origin of LLMs was Google’s work on language translation.
- jimmySixDOF 17d agofor me the live mode in androids google translate app has been as close as it gets to perfect for traveling cannot believe it is a free service after trying so many others
- LluisGerard 17d agoI have a similar experience using Gemini for quick Catalan translations for iOS apps given enough context. I once asked it to summarize The Hobbit in Catalan to explain it to my daughter before sleep. I was expecting a lot of mistakes as I see regularly if I ask anything in my native language when using GPT or Claude, but it was surprisingly good. I was going just to kind of skim ahead and retell it my own way, but ended up almost saying it verbatim because it was good already. She loves Zelda so I asked it to explain the story of Breath of The Wild keeping the original names, and to make it fun, etc.. I was surprised again. I did retell some bits in my own style and taste but it is very convincing. I haven't tried Catalan on newer models like GTP-6 Astra or Fable tho. We have all these benchmarks based on software development, and AGI, etc.. but it would be cool to have some language benchmarks for different communities. As I work in english and use them in english, I wonder if using LLMs in a different language to code renders a different result as well. Like, if some of these benchmarks were made in other languages, would the result be similar.
- jaggederest 17d ago> As I work in english and use them in english, I wonder if using LLMs in a different language to code renders a different result as well. Like, if some of these benchmarks were made in other languages, would the result be similar. I am not a Chinese speaker but my understanding is that all of the models have substantially different behavior in Chinese, to the degree that it's kind of like a second model. Would be interested in hearing more if anyone has direct experience.
- mncharity 17d agoFwiw, it's been very easy to nudge Qwen 27B/35B to think in Chinese. No need for <think> prefills like "思考：" ("Think:") or such. Relatedly, when chatting with frontier models about science education content design, I've found it very helpful to mix in Chinese education terms. In English, for example, NGSS is such a massive attractor, discussing nearby topics often yields NGSS "slop". And "estimation" (educational) in the US means one (dysfunctional:) thing, which similarly distracts. Perhaps if AIs become increasingly multilingual, but remain weak at deep conceptual reasoning, it may be fruitful to have multilingual thesauruses, to use language-associated cultural conceptual differences as a way to convey conceptual nuances with which LLMs otherwise struggle?
- eru 17d ago> In English, for example, NGSS is such a massive attractor, discussing nearby topics often yields NGSS "slop". For that particular attractor, even German or Spanish or so might help avoid it? Or perhaps even just using British English?
- mncharity 17d agoOh, good point! Something to check. I've been thinking of Chinese as a strength of Chinese models, but other languages might be sufficient here.
- normie3000 17d ago
- asdfman123 17d agoI love Gemini in Google Maps for long drives. I start getting bored of music and podcasts and start grilling it with random questions I've always wondered about.
- abhgh 17d agoI do this too! Usually some idea in ML ...when I am driving I might suddenly remember what I was thinking about and then it is my personal podcast via Gemini-in-Maps. My only complaint is if you have follow up questions, you have to be quick, otherwise it cuts off the mic.
- asdfman123 17d agoI feel like a 10 year old all over again with my frequency of questions. How did the early Roman Empire interact with Greek city states? How are LLMs planning on learning new information on the fly without new context or retraining runs? Why did mom leave? You know, standard stuff.
- throwup238 17d ago> Why did mom leave? Reinforcement learning by human feedback.
- Bluestein 17d agoThis would be horrendous if it weren't so true.-
- altmanaltman 17d ago> Why did mom leave? Even as a human being who has a working brain and all this thinking power, I am not sure how I would answer that. It's kind of funny Gemini will still come up with something and even suggest follow-ons to the conversation but saying all that stuff as a human to another human would be a wild response to that question.
- cm2012 17d ago
- HDBaseT 17d ago[flagged]
- antonvs 17d agoHow to tell if someone doesn’t understand selection bias…
- ramijames 17d agoI've been building a language learning app which uses AI voice chat to let people practice. Would that be something interesting for you to try out? It's all still rough, but we've been learning Japanese with it and its pretty cool.
- written-beyond 17d agoI want to, I have like a 2000+ day streak on Duolingo and I know I can only gain fluency once I start speaking it more.
- ramijames 17d agoWe (me and my teens) used Duolingo for a few years and.. didn't really get that far in actually being able to speak. It's kind of mind-blowing that they are the market leaders. In retrospect, I think of it more like an addictive language game and not really a good way to actually learn to speak. If you're really interested, shoot me an email.
- SoftTalker 17d agoLatest in a long line of scams for learning a language. Goes back to cassette tapes and records. The only good way is the natural way: immerse yourself in it.
- lIl-IIIl 17d agoSome cassette tapes work very well. Pimsleur for example. You can use it as supplement or do it standalone on your commute before a trip and end up with good pronunciation, vocab and a conversational skills.
- ramijames 17d agoWhile in general I do agree with you (it's how I learned Italian, Hebrew, and Thai) being on the ground for a year is cost-prohibitive for me right now, and unreasonable for kids under 16. What I've been building, with the help of a few language teachers, is our best guess at a really good way of learning new languages from the comfort of your home. It's not ever going to be perfect, but it is pretty good (at least so far in testing within our small group), and very cost-effective. If you're interested in funding it, I'm happy to go live in Japan for a year :)
- 3stacks 17d agoMy father-in-law was saying the same thing about Gemini 12 months ago regarding the Afrikaans speech. I've tried a few of them in my studies but none of them could seem to switch between English/Afrikaans except Gemini. It's an interesting time to be a language learner As jy wil, ons kan saam praat op Discord :) maar my Afrikaans is sleg
- FranzFerdiNaN 17d agoAs a Dutch person i find Afrikaans always interesting whenever i happen to encounter it in the wild. As if a common ancestor took a very different evolutionary path.
- aktau 17d agoGiven that Dutch is the ancestor here (not that Dutch hasn't changed since the split), I wouldn't call it "as if".
- 3stacks 16d agoIt's fascinating to look up the etymology of words and see how it looks in Dutch. I find Afrikaans to be much closer to English than Dutch or German (which I previously learned). Do you find Afrikaans comprehensible?
- basch 17d agoIt’s literally translation technology told to guess what’s most likely next instead of translate what it was given. It makes total sense it’s good at regurgitating the edge cases of language.
- manzout 17d agoDid this with shona.On the road trip we (3 human occupants) spoke to Gemini in ndebele, karanga, portuguese and ndau and have switch seamlessly to another lanuage like german without loosing the thread of the conversation. what impressed me was its ability to recognize the subtle dialects of shona being spoken, articulate its unncertainty, ask for clarification and carry on. when asked to speak those dialects it politely lamented it could not. when pushed it insisted and basically apologized in a technically correct but awefully pronounced sentence of the dialect before going back to english.
- zimprop 17d agoHey I literally just did the same thing after seeing the Afrikaans reference ndikawona kuti zvirikushanda! I was incredibly surprised, its shona was really formal but that makes sense when thinking about getting training data.
- _the_inflator 17d agoI like it. I had a friend at school who came from SA and spoke Afrikaans - so I know how a natural sounds like. For language learning, translation, research - it is fantastic. It works very well for certain dialects as part of a local language heritage as well: From Welsh to Bavarian - it is a joy to really get approval from people used to these dialects as being really accurate. Happpy times! :)
- NorthSouthNorth 17d agoLekker man. Although I speak it often, I could use an LLM to help me progress as I've been stuck at my current level for about a year and typing it is not something I enjoy. I find no greater joy than listening to a TTS model say Poes (Google translate is one of the funnier ones to make swear). Reminds me of being 14 lol.
- orsenthil 17d agoI am assuming these languages are present in translate.google.com If Google Gemini is good in languages other than English, while other models are not, then we can trace back it back to the translate.google.com as a resource as one possibility.
- resmofo13 17d agoI can't wait to try this! Gemini was already great at languages and just general spoken conversations. Me and my wife have been going through a rough time of it with some health issues, and talking to Gemini has been a boon through this period. Both of us are Indian, and in just the past day we've: - had insightful conversations on the diagnosis challenges of complex health issues that cross the mind-body connection that have helped us have more productive conversations with healthcare providers in the US - had fun conversations switching from hindi (spoken in a punjabi accent) to pure tamil to "city" tamil and then back to english (this time in a fake aussie accent). - used it to recommend some furniture we're looking for - come up with a specific south indian recipe with unique constraints (no oil, no dairy, only ingredients x, y and z in the fridge)
- brabel 17d agoI had a funny moment with ChatGPT. I was talking to it in English and then asked it to speak Swedish with me. It did, but with an English accent. But if you just start a session in Swedish, it speaks Swedish perfectly with local accent ( I guess Stockholm accent is closer to the truth)! Just thought that was really interesting.