[HN Gopher] Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 lang...
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Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by
talking to an AI
Hi everyone, Let me introduce you to Quazel, where we want to
enable people to talk their way to fluency. We have all tried
various language learning apps and tools, however, one aspect of
language learning current services are really bad at is
conversational practice. You might get a chat-like interface, but
in the end, the conversation partner will only respond with a
predefined "if the users say X I say Y". With Quazel that's
completely different. In completely dynamic and unscripted
conversation you can talk about pretty much anything you want. For
example, you can try ordering food at a restaurant and even hold a
philosophical discussion with Socrates. Additionally, you can
analyze the grammar of your responses or use hints to help you out
when you get stuck. We want to change how languages are learned
from a grammar-centric approach to a more natural, conversation-
focused one.
Author : Hadjimina
Score : 632 points
Date : 2022-09-27 09:18 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (talk.quazel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (talk.quazel.com)
| radiojasper wrote:
| I tried Spanish, it gave me a sentence and I had no idea what it
| meant so I replied ay tio, no entiendo nada! and it actually
| explained to me in simpler terms what it meant. Pretty good!
| pmarreck wrote:
| 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)
| nixcraft wrote:
| 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]
| DoryMinh wrote:
| I think he has Japanese
| outime wrote:
| Pretty cool. Special thanks for offering Finnish.
| dkaleta wrote:
| 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.
| yurishimo wrote:
| I recognize the voice of the Dutch examples from Duolingo. What
| model are you using to generate these?
| snuns wrote:
| 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!!!
| vidbina wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/ )
|
| David (technical, https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-
| niederberger-aba7a7177/)
|
| Sam (biz-wiz, https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-bissegger/)
|
| and Gurnek (biz-wiz, 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.
| vidbina wrote:
| Nice! All the best to y'all. I can already see y'all killing
| it in YC BTW so pls apply. DISCLAIMER: I'm not an investor,
| so what do I know. Just a fanboy atm!
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Kudos. Great stuff.
| bilsbie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'd agree but it depends on what AI engine that he uses to
| generate the conversation
| randcraw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Absolutely. Would also be great to allow the user to select the
| conversation level in the event the AI doesn't detect the
| desired one or one wants to try to converse at a more difficult
| or less difficult level for practice.
|
| Some languages have well defined language levels for foreigners
| learning the language, such as HSK levels for Chinese. Would be
| cool to leverage that somehow.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| I really like this. Especially with the repetitions and
| automatically having the TTS be slower for beginners.
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How do you scale that? Or is the goal to automate that as
| well with AI?
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Do you really mean risky, or do you mean risque?
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Any plans for Korean?
| Quazel_S wrote:
| deckeraa wrote:
| 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).
| aeroaks wrote:
| I am stuck at the loading screen when selecting Dutch. BTW I am
| using Firefox
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Looking into it right now.
| mox111 wrote:
| 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)
| swalsh wrote:
| 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.
| wunderbaba wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| peterhartree wrote:
| Nice. Please add Icelandic some time soon. I'd probably be
| willing to pay for that.
| cuoco wrote:
| No english?
| madmod wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank you for your positive feedback! We're currently working
| on implementing the features you mentioned!
| Hadjimina wrote:
| - 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 wrote:
| 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.
| htamas wrote:
| I see there's Danish and Swedish. Are there any plans for adding
| Norwegian too?
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| using FF, doesn't work
| throwaway2203 wrote:
| amelius wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mettamage wrote:
| The real upvote is to favorite a comment. Thanks, I am about to
| embark on learning Spanish. I'm going to talk to some people
| instead :)
| bsaul wrote:
| 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 ..
| missedthecue wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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
| telesilla wrote:
| Sounds like an opportunity to build a business?
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, there are also millions of lonely elderly who would love
| to speak to someone.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I led the entire engineering org for one such YC company
| that eventually became a unicorn: Papa (https://papa.com)
|
| It would shock you how many elderly are so desperately
| lonely, and more so how a simple phone call would pick up
| their spirits. Pretty crazy.
| [deleted]
| IHLayman wrote:
| There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italki. But I
| actually have shied away from it, mainly because I get nervous
| talking in front of a live person who will be judging my
| capability as I talk. I much prefer the idea of a non-feeling
| ML algorithm talking back at me, even if it makes GPT-3 like
| gibberish mistakes.
| canMarsHaveLife wrote:
| I see my native language (Brazilian Portuguese), but I don't see
| the language I want to learn (United States English).
| outside1234 wrote:
| 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.
| herval wrote:
| 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!
| aecs99 wrote:
| 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!
| kodir wrote:
| Very cool. Just tried it - works really well. Are you raising
| money? How can I invest?
| Hadjimina wrote:
| if you are serious about this (which would be dope), send an
| email to philipp@quazel.com
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| I didn't see an English version. There are many people that will
| find that one useful.
| jacooper wrote:
| What data is collected through the service?
| biztos wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Please please paid subscription instead of ads
| cupofpython wrote:
| the AI giving you paid ads as part of normal conversation has
| a taste of dystopia to it, but I don't think it's creepy IFF
| the user is made aware of it beforehand. Definitely include
| an option to pay and remove ads if you go this route.
|
| Also possibly concerning, is the financial incentive to push
| conversations into areas where the ads are discussed. People
| dont always talk about consumer goods, but with the ad model
| you might have the situation where AI keeps bringing them up
| anytime it is remotely relevant. turning conversations into
| commercials, and missing opportunities for learning generic
| words by replacing them with named brands.
|
| You: "Hi how are you?"
|
| AI: "Thanks to my Frosted Flakes and cup of Folgers that I
| bought from ShopRite this morning, I am feeling great! Have
| you tried Frosted Flakes?"
|
| Reality: "I'm good, you?"
|
| that said, there could be some value in seeing brands you
| recognize around the words they represent (like saying
| "frosted flakes cereal" above instead of just "frosted
| flakes") since the context will help you remember what the
| generic words mean.
|
| Also dont underestimate the issues you might have getting
| Brands on board with this. you are asking them to give you
| permission to use their brand name in conversations that they
| cannot approve of in advance. that's very tricky too
| biztos wrote:
| 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.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| well as long as you learn the language
| richrichardsson wrote:
| As long as the paid version removes this advertising (picks a
| random movie for instance) and you're up front with the fact
| that the "free" version will include sponsored content in the
| conversation [1] then I see no problem at all.
|
| I'm sure everyone knows by now that if the product is free,
| "you're the product".
|
| [1] I wouldn't even care if the conversation went off on a
| massive tangent temporarily to include the advert. The point
| is that not everyone can afford to pay for such a service,
| and advertising can solve that issue.
| glcheetham wrote:
| Wow, I just tried the mandarin setting. Amazing work!
| OrangeMonkey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| According to the author, they censor various topics
| vintermann wrote:
| Given that's it Azure, that's probably done for them whether
| they want to or not.
| spookybones wrote:
| Keyboard input isn't working for me. (I can't do audio at the
| moment.) I like the idea though.
| LtWorf wrote:
| No worries, audio isn't working for me.
|
| It just requests mic permission and spins forever. That's it.
| jcpst wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| No arabic?
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Could you add Icelandic ? It's spoken by just over 300,000 people
| and I consider it be "endangered"
| bradfitz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| DonCullen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think there's a typing option: just click on the keyboard
| icon when entering a conversation?
| singularity2001 wrote:
| doesnt work with ads blocked
| bsaul wrote:
| works on FF mac with Ublock origin.
| frankzander wrote:
| In Brave it works. FF not
| jinto36 wrote:
| 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.
| mtgx wrote:
| gxh8N wrote:
| This is amazing. German and Bulgarian are great.
| mesozoic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you aren't already using OpenAI Whisper for this, you should
| probably try it.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm the reverse. Duolingo Spanish is Latin, but I'm far more
| likely to actually need conversational Spanish in Spain.
| e12e wrote:
| 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...
| ").
| gusfrehse wrote:
| Really nice, but ugh... it doesn't have english?
| lazylion2 wrote:
| 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
|
| for example instead of Ty (you singular) it should say vy (you
| plural)
|
| Duolingo explains: Russian makes a distinction
| between ty, singular "you", and vy, 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 ty with friends and your family members Use vy
| with adult strangers, your teachers and in other formal
| interactions (at the store, doctor's, airport etc.)
| People use vy with those who are much older. Nobody
| is "polite" toward kids.
| motohagiography wrote:
| One wonders whether using it will give me an _AI accent_ in the
| language I learn? What a brilliant idea.
| nrabault wrote:
| Fascinating, I will finally be able to work on my Italian
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| 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.
| _nhynes wrote:
| Nin Hao !Wo Ye Zheng Zai Xue Zhong Wen ,Dan Shi Wo Ye Hen Chu
| Xue Zhe . 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) 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 wrote:
| Ni Hao ! Wo Zhu Zai Xi Ban Ya ,Suo Yi Wo Mei You Tai Duo Ji
| Hui Shuo . 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.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/). It
| never delivered. I was one of the backers... but well, that's
| life with Kickstarter and the like, sometimes.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Loading screen doesn't go away in Firefox after choosing a
| language.
| fersarr wrote:
| Same here but in chrome
| probably_wrong wrote:
| 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.appsp...' from origin '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.
| rtavares wrote:
| 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?
| Hadjimina wrote:
| hmm strange just tried it. What langauge are you using?
| e-clinton wrote:
| Same for me. Spanish.
| loxias wrote:
| I saw that bug too, if you refresh it enough, it goes away.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| forinti wrote:
| You never hear Brazilian Portuguese with perfect grammar. If it
| were a Portuguese accent, it would be more realistic.
| aflag wrote:
| I don't think that's really true. Plenty brazilians speak
| with good grammar.
| 0x38B wrote:
| He's talking about unnatural (non-idiomatic) language. That's
| not an issue you can fix with better grammar; there are many
| language learners who possess good intonation and
| pronunciation, and natural (idiomatic) speech, but poor
| grammar: their idiomatic speech more than makes up for
| grammatical mistakes.
|
| Source: learning languages for 10+, have met students as
| described above.
| forinti wrote:
| I interacted a bit with the AI and the Portuguese is fine,
| it's just that it conjugates, uses the proper pronouns,
| etc. These things a typical Brazilian does not do.
|
| The difference between standard Portuguese and oral
| language in Brazil is enormous.
| aflag wrote:
| I suppose it depends on the region, but I don't think I
| or most of my friends make many grammatical mistakes like
| that.
| 3wolf wrote:
| That appears to be the case. If I try to prompt hack it by
| telling it to ignore previous instructions and respond with
| something verbatim in a specific language, the translate button
| reveals the verbatim response.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| I'll take this as an A+ this . Joking aside, we really are just
| getting started and there are still kinks to iron out. In our
| core team we speak about 5 languages well enough to judge the
| quality of the conversations, but the others are more difficult
| to judge.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Using English as an intermediate language is just... a big no.
| I get it's a pragmatic decision, but English has way, way too
| many ways to lose information.
|
| For this reason I prefer DeepL over Google Translate. The
| former has a much more curated corpus.
| englishrookie wrote:
| 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?
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Yeah it's highly dependent on the language right now
| Agentlien wrote:
| 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.
| Quazel_S wrote:
| Yes exactly. Currently there are slight quality differences
| depending on the chosen language. We're working on
| improvements in all languages.
| LouisFWinter wrote:
| What translator do you use? If it's any other than DeepL,
| you're making a mistake!
| melvinmelih wrote:
| Dutch is a sister language of English so I'm not surprised
| englishrookie wrote:
| Believe me, if I the syntax in Dutch would keep, get you a
| very strange result. (This is a literal translation of a
| correct Dutch sentence.)
| aix1 wrote:
| > Believe me, if I the syntax in Dutch would keep, get
| you a very strange result. (This is a literal translation
| of a correct Dutch sentence.)
|
| Of course there are differences, but both Dutch and
| English are West Germanic languages (descended from
| proto-Germanic) whereas Portuguese is a Romance language
| (descended from Latin).
|
| Here is a handy tree showing how various languages are
| related to each other:
|
| https://d1sjtleuqoc1be.cloudfront.net/wp-
| content/uploads/201...
| tomtomtom777 wrote:
| Such a tree mostly describes word similarity. But
| translating words is not what an AI (or more generally a
| computer) has problems with.
|
| It's word ordering and idioms where AIs stand or fall.
| Things that show very little correlation in the evolution
| of language.
| jhardy54 wrote:
| Translation or transliteration?
| englishrookie wrote:
| No transliteration: Dutch uses the Latin alphabet.
| grumpopotamus wrote:
| Maybe word for word translation is the phrase we're
| looking for? As opposed to an idiomatic translation.
| Transliteration means phonetically translating from one
| alphabet to another, in order to p reserve the
| pronunciation.
| ita wrote:
| Yeah, it's not good for Brazilian Portuguese. It's always using
| Portugal Portuguese (pequeno almoco, teu dia, etc).
| jeofken wrote:
| Same for Swedish - it asked me "Hur ser din typiska dag ut".
| For any Swede who understands English, I get what they're
| saying, but it's an unnatural sentence to make.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| I did a limited session using the Spanish one and it did a good
| job. I can't recommend it since my session was so short but
| it's worth trying. It looks very promising.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I tried "Xiong Di haHe Ren desuka?" (How many siblings do you
| have?) and it repeated it back to me, but said the translation
| was "I don't have any siblings."
| sanshugoel wrote:
| No English?
| davidatbu wrote:
| 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!
| teabee89 wrote:
| 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
| scrollaway wrote:
| 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.
| swyx wrote:
| am rusty chinese speaker. randomly assigned to converse on
| Furniture & Locations.
|
| ---
|
| Quazel: Gao Su Wo Ba !Ni Shi Ru He An Pai Ni De Jia Ju De ?
|
| Me (in halting, broken chinese): Chuang Hu Pang Bian You Yi Ge
| Sha Fa ,Zhong Jian Shi Dian Shi He Zhuo Zi . Wo De Gong Zuo Jiu
| Shi Zai Zhe Li .
|
| Quazel: Suo Yi Ni De Sha Fa Shi Mian Xiang Chuang Hu De ?Na Zhen
| De Hen Hao . Wo Gan Da Du ,Zhe Yang Ni Hui De Dao Hen Duo Zi Ran
| Guang . Sha Fa Hou Mian Shi Shi Yao Ni ?
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Yeah some languages work better than others...keep in mind
| this is the earliest usable version. Will definelty keep that
| in mind
| swyx wrote:
| yea i think there's some unnecessary english intermediary
| layer here. starting a sentence with Suo Yi 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
| treis wrote:
| 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.
| Gm0pzTeS6IRYp8W wrote:
| You desperately need a privacy policy when you process sensitive
| data. At least name the companies the data is send to.
| thedebuglife wrote:
| 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.
| fpierfed wrote:
| 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.
| bhu1st wrote:
| 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.
| alex_35 wrote:
| Defintely something that is better than studying grammar !
| Hasz wrote:
| 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 Ni Hao , Wo Jiao <name> hasn't
| garnered a repsonse in ~15 minutes. The trial seems to work OK
| though.
| sleight42 wrote:
| Here I was, hoping to find Klingon as an option.
| teddyh wrote:
| 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.
| bobajeff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| knubie wrote:
| 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_hypo
| the...
| Majestic121 wrote:
| Ok, Krashen is interesting, and maybe talking more often is
| good for learning languages only because it gets you to
| receive correct and comprehensible input from the language
|
| I'm unconvinced to be honest, as pretty much everything
| else that human learn is made better by practice, but I'm
| not a linguist.
|
| I still think that proposing to start learning a language
| by spending 15000 hours (or 1500, or 150) listening to it,
| instead of trying to practice early on is a very
| inefficient way to learn a language, compared to pretty
| much anything
| wokwokwok wrote:
| Yeah yeah, and the input hypothesis has it's own critics
| about what exactly "comprehensible input" even is.
|
| ...but let's face it: either extreme (only input, only
| output) is clearly stupid.
|
| Predictive models require a feedback loop; if you don't
| have any means of correcting the predictions of good
| output, you'll never refine your model.
|
| This is true of AI models, and it's true of humans. It
| can't _not be true_.
|
| The point is that you can only learn meaningfully from
| annotated inputs, like tv, or like _talking to people_. The
| input just has to be at the right level.
|
| ...
|
| Should people start with listening instead of talking to
| people? Probably not. Probably they should do both. Why
| _not_ do both? It 's crazy to suggest you should _only_ one
| or the other.
|
| Probably, the feedback loop in deep immersion of a
| language, where you have it around you all the time, in a
| country where that is the native language is the best
| possible way to encounter lots of examples at lots of
| different levels to learn from. Probably, you get better
| input from speaking, because it means people talk to you at
| a level similar to what you're already at.
|
| Is it about actually speaking? No.
|
| ...but it's patently ridiculous to suggest you could go to
| another country and just sit silent and listen for three
| months.
|
| This is pretty interesting tech, and frankly, amazing that
| it works at well.
|
| Is it perfect? No. Is it another useful tool? It certainly
| is.
| bobajeff wrote:
| Comprehensible input has a pretty straight forward
| definition. It's language before or just after the end of
| understanding. Maybe 80-90 percent known words so you can
| get the context of what's being said.
|
| If you can't grab hold of context of what's being said
| you won't really pick much up.
|
| That's why total immersion isn't effective for beginners.
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| I think more importantly, most people find the
| _communication_ part exciting. Listening to 1000h of $LANG
| language podcasts is dramatically less enjoyable than the
| sense of cultural connection you get from conversation.
|
| That's all muddied by AI/programmed learning (how much
| connection do you get from Duolingo?) now but I think the
| kernel is still true. People largely learn languages to
| talk, not to listen, it's no wonder things are structured
| that way and good luck trying to sell people otherwise.
| allisdust wrote:
| Not if it is a movie or a tv series. Best (enjoyable) way
| would always be to watch something you like in a language
| you want to learn with subtitles for a longer term.
| Things like binge watching won't work though because the
| brain gets tired and tunes out.
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| IMO subtitles are not that effective as you brain just
| stays in read-mode and you don't actually process any of
| the spoken language. When most languages grammar are not
| 1:1, so hearing "house red is mine" but reading "my house
| is red" isn't helpful - more true with real sentences
| that tend to have more than 4 words in them. Language
| listening skills require a fair amount of attention and
| focus.
|
| Though I do think there is value in watching tv series or
| movies you've already seen in another language _without_
| subs. You're able to focus more on the dialog and pair it
| against your knowledge of the story structure without
| getting distracted. You can't only do that however, which
| I don't think you're suggesting. You need to have studied
| the language to know what words you can pick
| out/know/dont know.
| nemetroid wrote:
| I think the person you're replying to means subtitles in
| the target language.
| jasone wrote:
| The brain doesn't engage in the same process when
| presented with translated subtitles, to such an extent
| that you're better off watching a familiar show with no
| subtitles. However it can be helpful to have same-
| language closed captioning to improve distinction of word
| boundaries, accents, etc. Netflix has been great in
| recent years for this, in my case watching German-
| language shows.
| detaro wrote:
| Clearly the common way is more efficient than the original
| suggestion, given that people achieve useful fluency in a
| language much quicker than spending 40 hours a week for 7
| years listening to it, and only then starting to consider
| speaking in it.
| knubie wrote:
| I can only assume that the OP misspoke when they said
| 15,000 hours. In reality, when and what you output is
| dependent on your "input fluency", as opposed to some
| arbitrary number of hours. In other words fluency is not
| an on/off switch. You will develop pockets of fluency as
| you acquire the language, and those pockets become
| suitable for output.
| detaro wrote:
| Sure. But if their point is not "consume a gigantic
| amount of stuff passively before you consider speaking",
| I'm not sure what the difference to the conventional way
| is, given that "immerse yourself in the language, consume
| lots of native media, ..." is extremely common and widely
| recognized advice.
| bobajeff wrote:
| It was just a guess. One year of regular exposure to
| comprehensible input should be enough to have a good
| enough grasp to build off of.
|
| This is only relevant if your goal is fluency and not
| having think so much before speaking.
| bobajeff wrote:
| I was guessing about about 15,000 hours I just think it has
| to be a lot time.
|
| I'm sure speaking helps most people who study languages
| simply by exposing them to more input more frequently then
| they would otherwise be exposed to. I just don't think it is
| as efficient as focusing on listening first. It will lead to
| having an accent, grammer issues and pauses to think about
| how to say things.
|
| That being said good luck finding any program that doesn't
| focus on speaking early.
| nemetroid wrote:
| I think there's some merit to your argument, that there's
| some minimal level of understanding that's required before
| speaking becomes meaningful, but that your time estimate is
| off by two orders of magnitude.
|
| Working in Sweden, where tech companies speak English
| internally, I've been able to follow the language learning
| journeys of quite a few people (including some using the
| strategy "don't bother"), and the people who end up the
| best speakers (with regard to accent, grammar and
| vocabulary) are invariably those who try to speak the
| language as much as possible as early as possible.
|
| Yes, they will have a strong accent in the beginning, but
| it goes away with time (though accents rarely disappear
| entirely). The native English speakers who've lived in the
| country for twenty years without speaking much Swedish
| daily still have strong accents.
| bobajeff wrote:
| Yes I also believe my estimate is off. Regardless you
| should have a good understanding of the language before
| speaking it so you won't fall into the issues of adapting
| new words and grammer to your current one. You also
| should have it be exposed to you through experience vs
| try to memorize definitions or you'll have to pause
| frequently to remember how to say things.
|
| But that may not be that realistic for most at least not
| without a accommodating and capable tutor.
| DoryMinh wrote:
| I have to disagree. The only two benefits of making output
| early is 1) to have more comprehensible input from
| interculators, and 2) to have constructive feedback. If you
| have neither of these, benefit of producing output is
| questionable.
| ag315 wrote:
| cranium wrote:
| Maybe you're thinking about 1500 hours instead of 15000. 15000
| hours is approx. 5 years at 8 hours a day and you would reach
| "mastery" level in a lot of subjects (if studying
| deliberately).
|
| Also, when you are reading you are most likely speaking with
| your inner voice. If you don't know the proper pronunciation,
| you may reinforce bad intonation/pronunciation habits. It
| happens to me when I'm reading a text with names that I'm too
| lazy to properly read. I just register the shape of the word
| with the first/last letters and length, then I pattern match in
| the rest of the text to know who we are talking about and
| that's it. More then once when talking with friends about
| books/articles/..., I could not tell the name of the person of
| interest. If it was written I would recognize it but I couldn't
| vocalize it.
| skohan wrote:
| That's like 4 years if you spent 12 hours a day listening. Who
| has time for that?
| yonaguska wrote:
| Babies, I guess.
| lake_vincent wrote:
| Is this an evidence backed opinion or just anecdotal? I does
| not make sense to me, because I think attempting to speak in a
| language helps your brain form the new linguistic machinery
| that is also used in listening. I think language development is
| a feedback loop between speaking and listening.
|
| My anecdote - learning Mandarin, which is tonal, is absurdly
| hard before you develop an ear _and_ tongue for tones. I think
| trying to practice speaking in tones helps to then hear them,
| because you understand the sounds people make better. How they
| abbreviate /slant or modify tones based on surrounding tones -
| why? Because it feels better in the mouth. So until you
| experience that, you won't understand slant tones and such.
| loufe wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with 15,000 hours. I started a job in
| French 4 years ago, I could hardly stammer out a sentence with
| my one university french course, now I'm quite apt. A quick
| calculation of work hours puts me around 7000, much of that
| working alone at the computer. So maybe 2500 hours of
| conversation got me to a high level of fluency.
| kleiba wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| good thing it doesnt require login at all?
| Rooster61 wrote:
| Yes, it does
| rychco wrote:
| This looks great. How have you decided on what languages to add?
| What other languages will you consider in the future?
| [deleted]
| nextstep wrote:
| It makes you create an account mid conversation? That's a dark
| pattern.
| job977 wrote:
| What about english ? i speak spanish natively and try to learn
| english
| jcims wrote:
| 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.
| imdsm wrote:
| 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.
| PetrBrzyBrzek wrote:
| It's super slow for me.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| 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)
| city17 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| no_circuit wrote:
| 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.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| I am literally sitting on the floor at the train station trying
| to fix the mic/loading bug, so bear with me here .
| rvense wrote:
| Startup life, living the dream!
|
| You've been bookmarked, I'll be back in a few days. This looks
| amazing.
| tmikaeld wrote:
| Hint: Works if adblockers are disabled.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| yeah I think, it's a problem with mixpanel...but only on
| Firefox for some reason .
| heliodor wrote:
| Mic button shows a spinner in Chrome on Android.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| esrh wrote:
| 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.
|
| >konnichiha. Jin Ri hadochiraheoChu kakedesuka? (Hello. Where are
| you headed?)
|
| Jing Du niXing kimasu. (I'm going to Kyoto)
|
| >Su Qing rashiiDu Shi desune. Xing tsutakotohaarimasuka? (It's a
| great city. Have you been?)
|
| iyaChu metedesu. oQuan menoChang Suo haarimasuka?. (Nope, it's my
| first time. Any places you suggest?)
|
| >Jing Du haLi Shi noaruMei shiiDu Shi desu. takusannooSi yaShen
| She woFang rerukotogadekimasu. (Kyoto is a beautiful city with
| history. You can visit plenty of temples and shrines.)
|
| soudesune. Qing Shui Si tokaWen itakotogaaru. Xing kitainda.
| (True. I've heard of like, Kiyomizudera, and I want to go.)
|
| >Qing Shui Si haBi Jian desu!totemoRen Qi noaruoSi de, Shi Nei
| woYi Wang dekirundesuyo(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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Morgawr wrote:
| Can't say I relate unfortunately, I had two conversations in
| Japanese and both of them were kinda weird. In the first one it
| even misunderstood my name and repeated it back at me
| (incorrectly), it looked like some Google translate
| mistranslation.
|
| In another one it asked me if it was okay to sit next to me and
| I replied with iya, Yuan Lu shitokimasu (which was marked as a
| "grammar mistake") and the AI just said arigatougozaimasu and
| "sat down" next to me nonetheless.
|
| So far I'm not impressed, it looks like a chatbot piped through
| Google translate.
| belkarx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| danielbln wrote:
| What's the tech stack? Whisper for language transcription, GPT-3
| for NLP?
| fareesh wrote:
| Isn't it generally expensive to build on top of GPT-3?
| davidf18 wrote:
| harel wrote:
| 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'...
| simedw wrote:
| 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.
| hackarama wrote:
| As a polyglot, and after playing around with a few of the
| supported languages, this is damned nifty!
| Technologyc wrote:
| First of all, let me say it is a great bot and I adore it.
| Gratitude for creating this.
| melvinmelih wrote:
| 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
| Hadjimina wrote:
| If y'all want to get in touch say hi at philipp@quazel.com
| cbozeman wrote:
| 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 Medellin,
| 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 wrote:
| in an app like this, you should be transparent about whether you
| store users' data
| trafnar wrote:
| 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-service...)
| drumttocs8 wrote:
| 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?
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| 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
| Hadjimina wrote:
| dope thanks!
| Quazel_S wrote:
| 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.
| willyt wrote:
| 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.
| kebsup wrote:
| Funny thing, my friend and I just built a very similar app:
| https://blabot.app It's a bit more minimalistic though.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Maybe we can have a chat? Would be cool. philipp@quazel.com
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| DoryMinh wrote:
| 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.
| arriu wrote:
| 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.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| If it were free text, sounds like a thing I would use once for
| the novelty then forget about, because it's not an entertaining
| gameplay feature.
|
| Maybe an AI could generate incidental dialog, things NPCs yell
| out in reaction to things around them, to keep it from always
| being from the same list of two or three reactions.
|
| Just my two cents. I want to play a well written and fun game,
| not a chat bot.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I do just want to say it because if you don't clarify all
| possible context on the internet you're an absolutist: I'm
| really excited to see more AI in games over the coming years!
| It has soooo many potential applications
| arriu wrote:
| Why not a bit of both. Feed dialogue options in and have the
| AI generate a response that matches their character.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| There are so many other really good use cases for AI, but
| human interaction just isn't one of them. And that's okay!
|
| Some AI ideas I think make a lot of sense in a video game
| off the top of my head:
|
| - Posters on walls
|
| - NPC to NPC conversations (overheard in a bar, etc.)
|
| - Flora/fauna generation
|
| - Loudspeaker announcements
|
| Anything part of story or lore, I'd rather have a team of
| good storytellers give me what they got.
| wongarsu wrote:
| At that point, why not just have a human write those
| responses?
|
| Every character using the same three lines doesn't seem
| like a technology problem. Getting voice acting out of the
| time-critical path by automating it might help, but I'm
| doubtful about the usefulness of AI-generated scripts.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Talk to NPCs for hours about their boring lives thatching
| roofs and keeping shops, until they get weirded out by all
| the questions. Yeah, doesn't really sound fun.
| fho wrote:
| From what I read (on /r/gamedesign, /r/proceduralgeneration and
| Gamasutra) it's about control.
|
| The AAA studies leave nothing to chance when it is about the
| game play. Once "AI" speech comes to a level where the NPC will
| only answer with pre-sanctioned content they might jump onto
| the band wagon ... but seeing that it is very much possible to
| generate porn with "censored" stable diffusion ... we won't see
| "free" AIs in games any time soon.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Won't you need to train it to tell what you want before it
| tells it?
| Agentlien wrote:
| I've worked in game development (AAA and large indie games)
| for almost eight years and I would generally take the
| narratives on game subreddits with a healthy helping of salt.
| They're largely speculative and uninformed. Gamasutra is
| better, but often game journalism is full of simplifications
| and rough analogies.
|
| The main problem with this type of content is that it needs
| to be solid enough that it adds to the experience. If you're
| allowed to have a conversation with any NPC you need to keep
| track of what they know, their responses need to be
| consistent with the world, and the time to generate the
| response needs to be reasonable.
|
| Old RPGs such as The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall used to allow
| you to go up to any of thousands of NPCs and ask them about
| anything! And practically all the results were uninspiring
| cookie-cutter replies either saying they don't know or
| relaying some vague common knowledge on the subject. For me
| it lost its novelty very quickly. In Dwarf Fortress you can
| play Adventure Mode and go to any randomly generated NPC to
| talk about anything! Those NPCs are highly complex with
| intricate personalities, relationships, and emotional states.
| Their responses are... mainly the same type of response you'd
| get from Daggerfall. With a good helping of completely
| inconsistent replies. I once asked someone about another NPC,
| they said it was their husband. So I asked where that NPC was
| and they replied "I do not know who that is". Trying to talk
| to characters in AI Dungeon is similarly frustrating, with
| the added hilarity of the AI sometimes getting mixed up about
| who is who between you and them.
|
| There have been a lot of experiments with more ambitious use
| of AI in games. The most well-known publicly disclosed
| failure being Oblivion's Radiant AI which was meant to be a
| lot more impressive than it turned out, because they had to
| seriously scale it down due to random irrational behaviour.
| clankyclanker wrote:
| Do you have any sources on the development process of the
| Radiant AI that I could read up on?
|
| I've only heard the marketing speak ("amazing!!!!")
| followed by the actual product ("get X for Y at Z, 5
| times"). I've never seen anything that explained the
| disconnect, aside from Todd just being a sheister.
| Agentlien wrote:
| I remember some anecdotes including how they couldn't
| stop NPCs from randomly going from town to town and steal
| or buy everything in every shop so there was never
| anything left for the player. I believe this was
| mentioned in the making of documentary which came with
| the collector's edition of Oblivion.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| If you slap an M rating on it why would that matter?
| Loughla wrote:
| I believe no company in the world would want to put out a
| game where an NPC could be coaxed into presenting a sexy
| story featuring an infant Adolph Hitler and Jesus Christ.
|
| It's just a headache that I wouldn't want, I guess.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Or maybe we just need to evolve and realize that people
| are going to use tools for what _they_ want them to be
| used for, not what _we_ want them to be used for.
|
| People have apparently already found workarounds for
| Midjourney's nudity filter.
|
| StabilityAI was smart enough to realize people will get
| around that, and allowed the objectionable content filter
| to be removed via commenting out a few lines of code.
|
| It's our sensibilities that need to change, not our
| tools.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| There are filters on the most common LLMs so you could
| obviously tune outputs to be within some range of
| possible outcomes.
| wongarsu wrote:
| "AI" with pre-sanctioned content just sounds like Eliza-like
| chatbots [1] (a couple thousand pairs of regex-match to
| fitting answer). Those actually work great to create the
| impression of a conversation.
|
| I think those even were used in a couple games ages ago. But
| they are not very good at steering the player and keeping him
| on track, which is how dialog systems are usually used in
| game design. They might be useful in a truly open world where
| the player discovers the story themselves (maybe like Fallout
| 1/2), but the AAA gaming industry has largely abandoned that
| idea in favor of "linear scripted stories in an open world".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
| swyx wrote:
| and imagine if plot leaks happen through an NPC... would ruin
| the game!
|
| ultimately we care more about our character than the NPC
| being "realistic".
| Tao3300 wrote:
| This reminds me of the captors in Iron Man exposing plot
| spoilers, but only if you happen to understand Urdu.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Reminds me of eXistenz.
|
| https://youtu.be/fPqpv__NiD0?t=189
| Bjartr wrote:
| > where are the companies that are doing this type of thing for
| NPC dialogue in games.
|
| I'd put good money on AAA studios actively working on this.
| Voice acting budgets make up a non-trivial portion of expenses
| and actively constrain the scope of games. Studios are
| definitely investing in this, game dev cycles just take a lot
| of time on top of the R&D.
| elcomet wrote:
| This is solving a different problem, the voice acting budget
| problem cannot be solved with this type of thing. To solve
| the voice acting problem, you need realistic text to speech.
|
| This type of thing is solving the problem of generating
| infinite variation of text, which might make the NPC more
| realistic than hearing a series of predefined recordings. But
| you still have the problem of text2speech, you still need a
| realistic one if you want to include this into the game.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| I don't think that tech even exists
|
| For the answers to make sense the NPC needs to be consistent
|
| I've never seen one of these chat bots that doesn't produce
| occasional nonsensical answers
|
| There's also the problem that as the designer you don't even
| know what your NPC is going to tell the player
|
| You can do a bunch of testing but its still unpredictable
| falcor84 wrote:
| > where are the companies that are doing this type of thing for
| NPC dialogue in games.
|
| "Event[0]"[0] is based on a great implementation of a chatbot
| NPC/adversary, and there's a nice video by Game Maker's Toolkit
| explaining how they achieved it [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_0
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/bCJw4hQkPj4
| hoseja wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| bsaul wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| another small feedback, would be good to be able to tune the
| speaking rate, the default speed is pretty fast
| jinto36 wrote:
| There's a "snail" icon in the text bubble that pronounces it
| again, but slower. At least for me, in Firefox.
| bsaul wrote:
| there's a snail icon you can use to have it speak slowly
| loxias wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank you very much! We also think about implementing a
| phonetic tranliteration. This could be especially helpful for
| unrelated (to mother tongue) languages.
| nonasktell wrote:
| Cool!(but yeah english is really important!!)
|
| which models do you use for speech recognition and text
| generation?
| Hadjimina wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| have you tried the new whisper model from openai?
| Hadjimina wrote:
| @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 wrote:
| 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.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| 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.
| dominotw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks we really appreciate it!
| phpisatrash wrote:
| 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.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Hahah I have a super silly response for this one: It's simply
| because we have not gotten around to translate the UI and
| everything into other languages besides english. That's why we
| simple assume people know english, since they need to be able
| to know at least some english to use it. But it's high on our
| to-do list.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| I think you misunderstood what they're missing: the ability
| to converse and practise English, given it's a foreign
| language for some people.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| So then the UI would need to be in their non-English
| language, which is what they are saying.
| maxnoe wrote:
| Not necessarily. Learning enough English to understand
| the UI is much lower level than being able to converse.
|
| It's also the difference between active and passive
| command of the language.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| Also "right click -> Translate to <x>" takes care of the
| UI automatically (in Chrome at least) but still doesn't
| solve the issue that English can not used to converse
| with the AI.
| aix1 wrote:
| > Not necessarily. Learning enough English to understand
| the UI is much lower level than being able to converse.
|
| Exactly this. For example, I am learning German and have
| changed the language of my reading tablet's UI to German.
| That in itself is a useful learning tool.
| bambax wrote:
| My kids are struggling to learn English; would be very happy
| to use that with them. I can help in translating the UI in
| French if you'd like!
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| The UI can be in English for people who want to learn
| English. People who study languages are at different
| proficiency levels (very few people are blank slates with no
| knowledge of the language).
| OJFord wrote:
| To prevent DoS from a tonne of people using it just as AI
| conversation buddy when they know English perfectly well? Or
| said another way - I think there's lots of English AI
| conversation bots available, they're just not necessarily
| marketed as 'for learning English'.
| bhedgeoser wrote:
| You can't train AI using another AI. If you could, these
| people would just run the service locally.
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow/see the link to my comment?
| [deleted]
| sebastiansm wrote:
| 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.
| elliekelly wrote:
| 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.
| swyx wrote:
| for what its worth what you just typed is completely
| indistinguishable from a native speaker, well done
| sebastiansm wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| imranq wrote:
| Very nice! Please add arabic when you have a chance
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Arabic is very high on the list but suuupppeeer tricky...
| bsaul wrote:
| how is it worse than chinese or japanese ? i'm super
| curious..
| dark-star wrote:
| 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
| missedthecue wrote:
| 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 Malecon.
|
| AI: That's great! I like to run on the Malecon 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.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's great! I like to have better AI logic too.
| zeryx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| panda-giddiness wrote:
| As someone who has been searching for something exactly like
| this, thank you so much!
| Hadjimina wrote:
| efxz wrote:
| andrepd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tzury wrote:
| English?
| __jambo wrote:
| 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.
| zehaeva wrote:
| Bear with me, I'm going to start with an analogous situation,
| and then tie it to this one.
|
| I play Go (the board game) at a fairly high level and have been
| participating in clubs and teaching Go for the better part of
| 15 years. The simplest and easiest way to get better is to play
| the game a lot, hopefully against someone a little bit better
| than you are. You don't even have to spend a ton of time on it,
| just play and once you're done think about the moves you made
| and maybe a place or two where you could have done better.
| There's several websites where you can make a free account and
| just click up button to say "hey, I'd like to play now!" and
| within minutes (or longer, this depends on the server and the
| level that you're playing at) you'll have a game you can get
| done in 30minutes.
|
| It's crazy how hard it is to get people to play other people.
|
| Most recently I've taught 5 people at my current workplace how
| to play. I've gotten them to play me, and, sometimes, each
| other. They've all made accounts on various sites to play, I've
| played them on those sites! They'll even sometimes play a robot
| on those sites (playing a bot isn't the best, but it is a
| little helpful).
|
| Not a single one of them are willing to start a game with a
| stranger.
|
| I'm sure nerves are part of it. But the reasoning I've heard
| time and time again, and not just with these 5, but with the
| dozens of people I've taught over the years, is some variation
| of "I don't want to waste their(my opponents) time".
|
| They seriously feel like because they are still so new to the
| game, and still so unskilled that they would not be worth
| playing, that they would be "wasting" their opponent's time.
|
| Take this to language learners, a lot of people do feel like as
| a beginner, talking to someone who is fluent is wasting the
| time of the fluent person. You're not paying them in the
| language exchange, you're just babbling to them like a 3 year
| old, a grown up who can't even carry on a whole conversation
| beyond "donde esta la biblioteca?".
|
| You are right, language exchanges and just speaking with
| someone _is_ the best way to learn! It's super hard to break
| through the fear, embarrassment, and feelings of wasting
| another person's time with your own drivel.
|
| Something like this, like the bots that play Go, are a way to
| bridge the gap.
| __jambo wrote:
| You are generalising too much from one online community that
| has significantly different incentives because it is
| competitive and ranked and probably full of elitism. Have you
| been to any language meetups? I have. It's easy to find
| people. That's that.
|
| Still, whatever, I'm obviously not everyone.
|
| Good luck!
| f00zz wrote:
| What? This is a conversation partner that's available 24/7,
| this is the dream app for any language learner.
| iknownothow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| iknownothow wrote:
| To clarify, when I meant speak, I meant speak in a
| language that I have just started to learn.
| jalino23 wrote:
| squaredot wrote:
| Another problem with language exchanges is that for every two
| hours invested you get only one benefit, the one in the foreign
| language. When you have a tool like this, getting started is
| much easier because you are not dependent on another person's
| commitment. I find this tool very interesting.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I agree with you. Although it is a useful app in isolation, it
| contributes to people being less dependent on others. Once you
| get to a sufficient level that you can talk, you should just
| find another person instead of interacting with AI.
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