Great job! I just played with it and really liked it.
In terms of "getting it to take off", I'd suggest partnering with some language schools first. For example, there is an Alliance Francaise in my city and most decent-sized cities in the US. The difficulty, of course, is that a lot of language schools may have valid fears about AI replacing them, but I think it would be a nice tool to add as an adjunct to human-taught lessons. For example, could imagine a "teacher view" of this, where you let the teacher set up the original conversation prompt to mirror whatever individual lesson is happening in their class. Could even make this part of homework where the teacher could then ask students to role-play with it for homework and make individual student's responses available to the teacher.
Is there a way to disable or hide the suggested responses?
I've been a Duolingo French learner for 11months and I'm adept at reading French aloud or at least well enough to have it recognized by speech to text. However, my response synthesis skill is severely under-developed - I have a difficult time choosing how to respond when spoken to. I can see the suggested responses being useful to someone practicing their pronunciation, but for what I want to improve upon, they act as a crutch.
Additionally, is text-to-speech on the roadmap? It would be nice to have a fully audio conversation, even to the extent of disabling the text output of the agent or instituting touch-to-reveal. Like a lot of language learners, I am quite a bit more adept at reading and writing than I am at speaking and listening.
Finally, a small bug(?). When I've selected a language to practice, speech to text shouldn't generate text which is outside of the practice language. I purposefully got sloppy a few times and Portuguese and Arabic were generated from my speech. I understand this isn't a deal-breaker, but it broke the immersivity of the experience for me.
I am also working on an app for learning langues and I must say, you've built quite a lot in 6-7 months!
Gaining and retaining users is always a problem that startups face. With language learning apps, it's hard because the marketplace is already crowded and learners will stop when they've learned a sufficient amount or just give up.
Prioritizing marketing and promotion can be difficult because it's very easy to get sucked into a project improving the product or adding a new feature. I think you're probably in need of content that users will feel compelled to share on social media and other places. You've gotten your app on HN and ProductHunt, Good job.
Some feedback - I tried your app for Spanish. I am somewhere between A2 and B1 level. It was slow to send the recording then provide a response, the speed would make it impractical to use in a practice setting. I wanted to type in instead of speak because I knew it was going to take some time for it to process.
As a learner, I think that chat bots have a place but I much prefer to spend my time talking to a real person over an ai/chat bot. I'd rather it ask me what I wanted to talk about than having a really boring conversation (what's your name? what do you do? where are you from?, etc.)
What level would you say the majority of users that are using your app are?
Good luck with your app, it's a huge effort.
Super cool and I love that people are putting effort in this space, in 1-3 years language teachers might be a thing of the past.
I just tried this out (have tried some others as well) but currently the voice to text is just too finicky. My Spanish pronunciation is quite good, not great, but often the input just got completely messed up beyond recognition.
Greetings! I really like your idea. I have been building a similar open source/non-commercial tool. I am essentially trying to build a solution to get me ready for a standardized Korean language exam. The format and UX of Giglish are extremely good, but I think there are a few places where you need to fine tune your prompts, at least for Korean language learning. I also wish there was a drill mode that is less open ended (I’ve seen an alternative tool that has a feature called “phrase pump”). I have a hard time keeping a conversation with an AI but love the idea that it can feed me quick prompts over and over again. This is ideal for someone who is studying a language and does not have easy access to native speakers. If you ever want to hop on a call to talk about ideas or get feedback I would be happy to provide it. My contact details are pretty easy to find.
Very cool. I've been trying to learn Spanish off and on for years, and this was super easy to try. Love the fact that you can use it without even signing up.
I wonder if you could look into partnering with some existing language tools? I might also look into telling schools about it directly, to help speed up the word of mouth.
Dag Fabian Ben je Belg? I woonde 7 jaren in Den Haag en later dichtbij Amsterdam. The work you have done & are doing sounds incredible. I am a retired translator / interpreter in Denver, Colorado, USA. Over 10 years, I have single-handedly developed a quirky multilingual mega-glossary. I work on it every day, and it's now about 19,070 entries in 9 languages. EN-ES-BR-FR-IT-NL-DE-SV-FI if you are interested, Fabian, I will send you a copy (Excel format). I resonate with what you wrote about most places forbidding self-promotion. bummer. My email address is easy to find using Google. Sincerely, André Fairchild Multilingual Maverick
What are you using for the speech-to-text? One thing that I really liked about Whisper was that I could mix english and Spanish and it would just work.. like "what does "una palabra española" mean?" and it would just work. Doesn't seem to work with this though.
Hey Fabian The work you have done & are doing sounds incredible. I am a retired translator / interpreter in Denver, Colorado, USA. I can have single-handedly developed a quirky multilingual mega-glossary. I work on it every day, and it's now about 19,070 entries in 9 languages. Very interesting, and free. EN-ES-BR-FR-IT-NL-DE-SV-FI if you are interested, Fabian, I will send you a copy (Excel format). I agree with what you wrote about most places forbidding self-promotion. bummer. My email address is easy to find using Google. Sincerely, André Fairchild
Have you thought about making more structured objectives? Shameless plug: I built a simple French/Spanish chat app and the #1 piece of feedback I got was that it's a bit aimless without any objectives.
I built out ~20 scenarios that would give users objectives like buying train tickets or ordering coffee. Now that's the most used part of the app (not the generic chat bot). As far as ads go, App Store ads are not bad and can't be ad-blocked, so that's an option.
Would love feedback! https://apps.apple.com/app/verbius-ai-language-learning/id64...
There's a few options I'm familar with
- content marketing over a long period of time, to build up a following. eg, (a shameless plug) [1]
- twitter / instagram / facebook. I hear facebook groups are pretty effective
- check out indiehackers for more people like yourself
- find somebody with a bit of reach and partner with them in some win-win way. Eg, reach out to udemy language instructors? You'd be suprirised how welcoming many people are to cold emails that respect them for their expertise
- repeat launches on product hunt
Holy crap this is awesome. Talking for the first time after learning from books can be really intimidating, this is going to be a game-changing way for people to practice alone and build up to talking to other people.
signup (just notes from a battle hardened ecomm engineer): - drop password, you already do the email confirmation loop, i almost noped out of the funnel when asked for yet another password - transition anonymous sessions to signed up users cleanly - drop the timezone question, too long, wtf, why even necessary - add big signup button to login page, login is more visible than signup so add another signup cta on the login page - see if you can get sessions to persist indefinitely and not even have to do signup - see if you can get to email-only signup - implement social auth so folks don't have to type their email, you are targeting mobile users who have tap (type) fatigue already
actual product: - i need it to ask me questions, and attempt to determine my skill level on it's own. i found myself asking (in french, which this keyboard has a terrible time recognizing) "what's the deal with pension reform in France", which is just my pathology at work: I'll gladly cook up great questions to get my interlocutors talking, but i need more prompts to get my speech synthesis and auditory processing systems running better (which another poster alluded to as well).
totally tangentially, my wife corrected my French while i was playing with this toy and got a loving chiding. god bless the attentionally and impulse-inhibitorially challenged :eyeroll:
This is outstanding. And the limitations of its speech recognition are actually a feature - it forces me to really concentrate on pronunciation. Now do Mandarin and take my money please :)
This is a very promising platform. However, it misses some very crucial things about learning languages.
Here goes: Learning languages is mostly about getting tons of input. I tried using this for a few minutes, but all the input I got was some lines of text.
Also: People say that learners don't get as much chances to output as they would like. That isn't mostly true. And even farther from the truth is to say that outputting more would lead to better language acquisition.
Nice try, though.
Nice work, Fabien!
I recently released my own tool for language learners, bitextual[1]. I announced it on the language learning subreddit[2]. This kind of thing is allowed there, and it led to some useful feedback.
[1] https://bitextual.net [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/
This is really cool. I like it. I think a few simple things would be:
-- a toggle to ensure that what you get back is automatically translated to english, and the translation is easier to read. In fact, making sure you can always see translations right away would help, even for suggestions.
-- Much simpler conversations to begin with, my Spanish is basically non-existent from when I took it in school, and the teacher input and the cafe prompt was already too far over my head.
I like it a lot, good job!
If I could make one suggestion, add a way to input text using the keyboard. Yes, I want to practice talking, but the voice-to-text is still far from perfect, and it makes it awkward. It often mishears things, and sometimes thinks I speak other languages that I don't even know! Maybe also add a way to say that "this isn't what I meant to say", and give me the choice of the top 3 highest ranked interpretations.
Also, one feature I think would help a lot, is if the bot was a bit more active, like quiz me, comment on the errors I'm making, and build "lesson plans" so that I can focus on the topics, instead of having to think what questions I should ask.
Having said all that, what you already have is a really great start! I signed up and looking forward to check it again in a month or two.
Looking at this I've been trying to use GPT like this for a while which I'm assuming is all this is. That said, the experience leaves a lot to be desired.
1. As someone else mentioned, I am coming into this having no idea about the language. Some way to identify words would be nice. Or some actual teaching. 2. I don't like that I'm forced to talk to it. I wanted to be able to just chat with it.
Love it! I built a similar product, Carlos App (carlos-app.com). Lots to take away.
re: tkaing off, Have you tried any 'growth hacking' stuff? One idea -- a "language fluency test" that people could share on social media that links back to your site. Something fun/shareable to go viral
I notice you disabled the dictionary to preserve screen real estate. Why not make the dictionary a hover-over effect per word? That's how Duolingo does it.
Really nice! I tried Russian. A few comments. (Also please add Hebrew and Arabic)
- The level was too high for me and I wasn't sure how to ask the teacher to ask me something simpler. She did say something about talking slower but my problem was with not understanding specific words. (OK, I see now that the text can be translated so that should help)
2. The suggestions assume you can read the langue but often it's not the case when one learns to speak. I don't see a translation option for the suggestions (adding pronunciation might help; can be English text)
3. It's a bit slow. I totally understand why but I think in order for users to have long conversations, speed is crucial.
4. I would be happy to pay for something like this. I think it could make sense to target kids. Many parents, me included, would be happy to pay for their kids to use something like this. I'm assuming Doulingo are going to add something similar but don't let that distract you. Great job!
Seems a very good idea.
As I'm really not fluent in the language I'm learning, it would be super useful to me to be able to click on any word in the dialog to see it's translation, no need for grammar or complete sentences, only the words I don't know!
Here is some feedback. I tried Spanish, but I don't speak it at all. The AI teacher starts speaking Spanish to me and I have no idea what is being said.
Not sure how I can learn anything from this.
This is amazing. I tried coffeshop with Spanish and worked great. I wouldnt mind paying subscriptions for this like i do for duolingo. Congrats!
I really love the idea -- learning a new language can be pretty embarrassing, and a chatbot is a wonderful way to practice (in theory). The site worked pretty well with German! It would be helpful to be able to click on words I'm not familiar with (or have forgotten - I haven't spoken in over a decade) and get a short definition.
Mexican Spanish didn't work at all. It asked me "Como te llamas" and I replied, "Me llamo Isaac", which got speech-recognized into some French sentence. I tried again saying "Si, me llamo Isaac" and it got recognized as some gibberish like "C. Mi anno E Sack" or something.
In your Python course, I was able to run os.listdir() arbitrarily and explore your container and mounts and create files in /var/tmp.
I didn't try writing elsewhere or getting destructive, but one can imagine. I did not run a while true to exhaust your disk space, but somebody else could.
I started using it in my native language. The second sentence I spoke, it detected the first part correctly, but the second part it wrote in Chinese. The app told me sorry, I don't speak Chinese.
I think this could bridge the gap for many people stuck at A level and trying to cross to actual communication, which requires lots of interaction so that the words and sentences start popping up.
Very cool can’t wait to try it. I’m curious about offering Bosnian which basically no language apps do.
Was it just easy to offer or is there more of a connection.
My wife is Bosnian and I have learned some over the years.
incredible. As a non native speaker, I always want to improve my speaking skills. And I also thought of building something using AI. But you have nailed it. Kudos.
I spoke "Mi Chiamo Chris" and it heard "Mi Kiamo Chris", then proceeded to tell me to spell it with a 'C' not a 'K'.. ok then.
It's been working way better than I expected. Good job!
Hey, this is cool!
Is it possible something more than the speed throttle for beginners? Could the AI use simpler language for beginners and more complex for advanced users?
Amazing! Great Site. would love it if you add Turkish
I wanted to try it in Hindi, but it was unavailable. Would love to play around w/ it in that language.
I love the idea though!
This is fantastic. Love it.
It is like Quazel but, Quazel is better.
Add Danish!
what do you use to build this product? Are you using gpt3.5 and whisper ?
So here's some more balanced feedback, if you will (playing with a language I know quite well already):
On the positive side: the bot itself has excellent voice quality (it still sounds bot-like -- but people expect that) and makes very few pronunciation mistakes (I only noticed one). Its vocal recognition is, I would say ... not great, but good enough (it recognizes well enough if I say simple, standard things, but it easily confused if I use less common -- but also perfectly correct -- formulations). At least, vocal recognition as such is not its weakest spot.
You can ask it questions about fairly detailed topics and get reasonably correct answers most of the time (as with GPT, which I'm guessing is its backend). It can sometimes give you very nuanced feedback as to your diction and usage (it will notice when you're using a formulation that is correct but not standard, and give you a detailed explanation as to why).
However, what I don't like -- and what made me ultimately decide not to invest further time with the app at present:
(1) You can easily feel lost (in "Teacher" mode) because all it can do is answer questions -- it isn't guiding you anywhere, and you have to already know what questions to ask.
(2) Even so, I thought to myself -- "well I can see how a good Q+A bot can be useful -- let's see what we can do with it". And here's where I got most disappointed.
I told it I wanted to practice my pronunciation -- and first asked for it to come up with some sample sentences, and then thought of one of my own -- one of those sentences you would say to someone at the family dinner table to try to wow them with your language skills.
In both drills, I played a little trick on the poor bot -- I deliberately mispronounced the sentences, the way a stereotypical Ugly American would -- basically mangling every single syllable in some obvious way, hoping to get a long list of corrections from the bot.
And it totally failed at this task. It kept saying "You said that perfectly! Well done!" or some variant. When I knew for a fact that my pronunciation was an epic fail, and I would have greatly embarrassed myself at that family holiday dinner.
(3) But things got even weirder when I tried to tell the bot "Wait you're wrong, I actually made lots of mistakes." More than half the time it would get horribly confused, sometimes telling me -again- that I said that sentence perfectly, sometimes "correcting" its own sentence.
So it's quite scatterbrained (just like GPT-4 is, when you try to make it backtrack and acknowledge some kind of mistake). It also misunderstands questions about grammar if I ask it to explain something it just said, or which I said in a sentence previously.
Bottom line -- it's a very mixed bag. Partially quite impressive -- but far too often, extremely frustrating to work with. Once one gets past the "wow!" aspect of working with a bot that seems well-spoken and (quantitatively) seems to have a lot of knowledge about grammar and usage -- the frustration arising from its scatterbrained-ness, and more fundamentally, just never knowing if I can really trust its answers takes over.
On the whole it just grinds my gears ... like pretty much any other chat bot I've attempted to try to get useful information out of.
That and again -- it isn't guiding you anywhere. If it can't reliably keep track of what it just said (or what I just said), it's definitely not going to be able to assess my progress, or tell me how to improve (beyond the random piece of generic advice it doles when it doesn't have anything better to say).
Of course it won't. It's just a transformer bot, after all. And the technology is categorically nowhere capable of doing that.
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Okay, here's some brutal feedback, please take it with your best interests at heart. I am an English native speaker who has lived in Spain for 10 years, and has become fluent.
1) These speech-to-text models are poor when it comes to non-natives. This is unfortunate as the idea you had and the product you've designed could be incredible for language learning. However - it's a bit crap - sorry - I can speak Spanish well and was asked in the conversation if I wanted a medium sized cup of coffee, I replied "sí, mediano", the resulting text was outputted as "mariano", then in the role play the coffee shop worker then assumed my name was Mariano! Completely ludicrous and frustrating.... in real life the coffee shop worker is clearing expecting the word 'mediano' and will hear what I said and know that's what I was trying to say. The speech-to-text-model completely fails to get this.
Until speech-to-text models trained on non-natives are made readily available, products like this with so much promise will infuriate learners, which will stop them paying for it.
And this was ordering a coffee.... imagine an actually complicated conversation.
So my advice would be, right now the speech-to-text models aren't capable of doing what you're hoping they can do... but.... once you get a model that can, this will be insanely popular....
So hang in there, other than that it was a fun experience, and critically, people are scared of practising with real people, something like this would be insanely popular if it actually worked well. Good luck.