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Ask HN: Conversational AI to Learn a Language

85 points edweis | 1 comments | 17 May 25 07:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Hi all,

I want to learn Dutch and by experience I know I learn better when talking with native speakers.

From your experience, is there a good AI I can converse with in Dutch? It would be even better if I could see the transcription in Dutch.

Gliglish (https://gliglish.com) looks good but is more for speaking than for learning. I'd like to be able to set a situation (negotiating a job offer, calling a supplier ...).

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jc4p ◴[21 May 25 02:30 UTC] No.44047779[source]▶
Hi! I have a WIP of this over at https://talktrainer.app/ -- I just added Dutch to it.

It uses OpenAI's realtime API to simulate either a tutoring session (the speaker will revert to English to help you) or a first date or business meeting (the speaker will always speak the target language)

You can see the AI's transcriptions but not your own, limitation of the current OpenAI API but definitely something I can fix.

The prompts are like this: https://gist.github.com/jc4p/d8b9d121425ec191d62602d8720eeed... and the rest of it is a Nextjs app wrapped around the WebRTC connection.

I'm not fully in love with the app so I'd love any feedback or hearing if it works well for you -- It doesn't have a lot of features yet (including saving context) and if you bump into the time limit just open it up in incognito to keep going.

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1. internet_points ◴[21 May 25 09:04 UTC] No.44049611[source]▶
This is great! Maybe some more tourist-related scenarios, like "ordering at restaurant", "resolving dispute about rental car crash" etc? :-)

The "next level" feature would be to get it to speak even simpler, with some hints about how to reply, for the beginners. I don't know how that would ideally look, but maybe a button to pop up some "key words" or phrases that one could use? (Even so, I found myself using the little I know, so it's obviously somehow working even though my knowledge is extremely basic.)

This is one of the places where I feel LLM's can do something good for the world, giving a safe playground for getting experience with speaking new languages without the anxiety of performing badly in front of other people – and hopefully make it easier to connect with real people in that language later.