[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) - Language learning wi...
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Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) - Language learning with a
conversational AI tutor
Hi HN we're David, Sam and Philipp and we're building Univerbal
(https://univerbal.app). We're an AI language learning app where
you talk to your AI Tutor, just like you would with a human one.
Here's a short demo of what that looks like in an actual
conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IukKGc00juY We
actually started as a Show HN over a year ago and the responses we
got from the HN community led us to apply to YC and make an actual
company out of a side project (original Show HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32993130). We were called
Quazel which we have since realized is too hard to spell and only
makes sense in German. We started off as only offering open-ended
conversations. While that is still at the core of what we do, we
quickly realized that we need to solve a bigger problem for
learners than simply giving them the option to hold a conversation
with an AI. Tutoring is (usually) the highest quality of education
you can get. The curriculum is based on your interests and needs,
you move at your own pace and you get personalized feedback about
your specific mistakes. At the same time, the reality is that
tutoring is prohibitively expensive for most people, let alone that
it can be very time-consuming to find a tutor that you like and you
have to work around their schedule. We want to fix these issues by
providing an AI Language Tutor that's available whenever you want
and affordable to everyone. Now the tricky thing about this, is
that a human tutor (to no one's surprise) actually does many things
at the same time, which are very much not straightforward to
approximate, even with AI. The interaction part of a tutor session
is already the main interaction in Univerbal, through speaking and
having the replies read out loud. The hard part intervenes when you
try to replicate the progress tracking and tailoring of the
curriculum. These are things that tutors automatically do, and
getting a system, even one that's based on LLM to do something like
that is very hard! Our current approach is based on "Skills" (e.g.
I can introduce myself), that a user works towards. These are a
measure of where the user currently stands and we use this progress
in a feedback loop to come up with relevant and interesting next
lessons for a learner. I often get asked, "Ohh so is it like
Duolingo?". When I get that question, I smile, feel something
inside me die and then say that, while Duolingo is a great
language-learning app, we don't really see them as our competition,
rather we see online tutoring platforms (italki, verbling, cambly
etc.) as the companies we're "attacking". We already have a couple
of success stories. One of which comes from an Australian user
who's living in Italy and has successfully prepared herself for her
Italian B2 language exam by using Univerbal :). If you'd like to
give it a try, you can try it without an account for free for 7
days (no credit card required). Afterwards, it's about
$10ish/month. One thing I'd love to get HN's opinion on is how
much gamification you think we should add. On the one hand, we
don't want to become a "game" and a Tutor lesson is always a "hard"
thing and kind of exhausting, but there is obviously some balance
to be struck there. Thoughts? David, Same and Philipp (me :) )
You can try it without an account at https://chat.univerbal.app
Author : Hadjimina
Score : 90 points
Date : 2024-01-30 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
| abricq wrote:
| This looks really cool, for sure I will to try this out ! I will
| look into it for Italian.
|
| I'm not sure how much work is it for you guys to add a language,
| maybe it's easier for you to add languages than for other
| mainstream platforms thanks to the use of AI ? If it the case, it
| would be really nice to have one serbo-croatian language, such as
| croatian or bosnian.
|
| I struggled to find ressources for these languages. Since a few
| months I have been trying to learn Bosnian (going on a long trek
| in the balkanies this summer) and I was just not able to find any
| "modern" service (Duolingo, Babel, etc ...) which supports these
| languages. I guess it makes sense since almost no-one wakes up
| and decide to learn Montenegrin, but maybe you can find a niche
| market.
|
| Anyway, cool product ! I hope you guys make it.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| even though the AI might know some of that language, it will
| probably not be familiar enough to basically never make a
| mistake. Another problem is that speech recognition, Text to
| speech and the translator also need to work in that language.
| dindindin wrote:
| While it won't be a full-on app, you might want to look into
| YugoGPT/YugoChat https://www.yugochat.com/en as it was
| specifically trained on the b/c/s/m languages
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| I like it (was actually just thinking about a bot like this after
| seeing a related submission on hn yesterday).
|
| Bit of feedback: the UI confused me when it asked for what
| language I want to learn. I didn't realize the flag was a button
| to choose my language and spent a little while in two different
| browsers thinking the space next to the microphone was a textbox
| to type in or the microphone was the button for letting me talk.
| For some reason "use the buttons above to continue" didn't make
| any sense to me until now. Maybe cause there was only one button?
|
| Anyways, I don't use a lot of apps and when I do I often find the
| UI to be confusing, so I might be an outlier here. But I almost
| gave up and didn't try it.
|
| Good luck!
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Yep, I agree that could be made clearer.
| bmulholland wrote:
| The other company in this space I've been following is Speak
| (https://www.speak.com/). Aside from supported languages, how is
| Univerbal different?
| Quazel_S wrote:
| When learning a new language, you should always go for Swiss
| guys. we have four national languages ;)
| Hadjimina wrote:
| To add something here. We're really focusing on the tutoring
| aspect and fundamentally tailoring everything to the user's
| progress. Speak has a couple of ideas that are similar, however
| many more that are vastly different.
| pamelafox wrote:
| I like it! I wish there was a clear toggle to completely disable
| audio input/output. I'm trying to practice while baby naps on me,
| so I can't say or hear.
| convivialdingo wrote:
| I really like it!
|
| It worked the first time after asking for mic permission.
|
| But second time, I did have a problem with the mic button on iOS
| 16.6.1 getting stuck on but not taking audio input.
|
| Pushing the button again (to cancel perhaps) did nothing.
|
| Switching to tutor mode fixed it for another input.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Just to clarify:
|
| So it showed that it was recording but it actually wasn't? Then
| you switched to tutor, clicked on the mic again and it worked?
| goat-throwaway wrote:
| This looks great. Learning a new language as an adult is
| extremely hard. Curious if the conversations are curated or is
| there some AI/LLM behind this.
|
| Have struggled with learning Chinese, will give this a shot.
| cpitman wrote:
| Couple things, all reported from Android Chrome:
|
| 1. The FAQ on the landing page hides questions as answers are
| opened, and it is not obvious that previous answers need to be
| closed to see everything.
|
| 2. On the FAQ page, when opening the hamburger menu, the menu is
| clipped and must options are hidden.
|
| 3. The FAQ question about pricing does not answer the question,
| and I see no where to get an answer.
|
| 4. Re: gamification, I think it is enough to reward users with
| making progress, and encourage them to use all the different
| kinds of modes/ features.
| Quazel_S wrote:
| Thank you for the hints! All of those are noted and will be
| fixed asap. We absolutely agree regarding the gamification :)
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Re:Pricing, I mentioned something around it in the HN launch.
| Currently the price is 10-is USD/month.
| Gys wrote:
| Talking works great! But I struggle to give reasonable answers
| because I do not speak my language of choice. I understood all
| though. So suggestion: offer on option to learn something new and
| practice verbs.
| Quazel_S wrote:
| Did you already try out the guided mode? If not you can always
| switch in a conversation on the top left chat settings, by
| pressing on the cogwheel and then switching to guided. Hope
| this is something that could help you!
| losteric wrote:
| There's definitely a gap for going from zero to something.
|
| The guided conversation is too many words at once, it's
| overwhelming. I immediately see a prompt to assemble two
| sentences from a list of words I don't know without
| translations or hints. It's the opposite problem of Duolingo
| drilling the same phrase a dozen times a day.
| wouterjanl wrote:
| Interesting concept! I wanted to try it out but I'm missing Hindi
| in the list of languages you can learn. Curious about why the
| languages that made the cut did so and if you plan to add more
| languages in the short time?
| a1j9o94 wrote:
| I had the same issue. I've been looking for good ways to learn
| Hindi.
| Quazel_S wrote:
| Thanks for your comment. We're constantly working on adding
| more languages, but we also want to make sure that we can
| provide you with excellent Quality in all languages we offer.
| tkgally wrote:
| It looks like you've made a good start. I tried it now with
| Japanese, and it worked pretty well. I wish you the best of
| success.
|
| A few comments:
|
| For Japanese, you might want to offer a choice for the amount of
| kanji to use in the written transcriptions that appear on the
| screen. Your current transcripts use the standard orthography,
| including kanji; some learners might like that, while others,
| especially beginners, will prefer that everything is in kana or
| romaji.
|
| Other languages have similar aspects that should be customizable
| for learners: levels of politeness and formality, dialects and
| accents, grammatical gender, etc. It will be hard to do that with
| the current LLMs, but as better models become available it should
| become possible.
|
| Multimodal LLMs that were trained on audio will be necessary for
| the tutors to respond to users' pronunciation and intonation,
| produce natural backchanneling (an important part of conversation
| in Japanese and some other languages), etc. Perhaps such models
| will be available later this year.
|
| Regarding gamification, how about offering choices to your users?
| Some learners will like gamification and benefit from it, while
| others don't need it and will find it annoying.
|
| It's not clear from the free demo whether the characters one
| converses with are persistent or not. Especially for intermediate
| and advanced learners, it will be very valuable if your customers
| can chat with the same character repeatedly and that the
| character remembers the content of previous conversations and
| adapts accordingly. LLM context windows are getting longer, so
| that should be feasible. (Conversely, you will lose customers if
| they find that they are having the same conversations again and
| again or being encouraged to talk about things they aren't
| interested in.)
|
| Also, you might consider setting up three-way conversations: two
| bots and the learner. One-on-one conversation practice can be
| tiring to the learner, and the learner doesn't get a chance to
| observe how fluent speakers talk to each other. If the bots
| sometimes interacted with each other, the learner would both get
| a break and have a chance to learn by listening to the bots
| converse.
|
| I have worked in language education for many years, and it seems
| that I was the first person to post a video to YouTube about
| using ChatGPT for language learning, on December 5, 2022 [1]. If
| you might find it useful to discuss ideas with me, feel free to
| get in touch. The URL of my website is in my profile.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/NVPHY3fYfmc
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Great point! The 3 person conversation is a super interesting
| point, since then the user can take more of a passive role and
| only occasionally intervene.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Interesting. I'm currently playing a little bit in the
| instructional space, it's impressive what you can get GPT to do
| there.
|
| I would absolutely lean into the game aspect as long as it
| doesn't impact the quality of the tool. People love games and it
| lets you tie everything into a story, which people also love. For
| instance, people love stardew valley and it has inspired a bunch
| of youngsters to become farmers, but what if it actually taught
| farming?
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Good point
| patrickwalton wrote:
| Very cool! Just a heads up your Google play button just takes me
| to the apple store
| Quazel_S wrote:
| Thanks for the hint, We'll fix that!
| statusfailed wrote:
| Nice! I built the same thing to learn chinese[0], it even has the
| in-context word lookup!
|
| I have a feature request: if I don't have a pinyin IME installed,
| it's very hard to use - it would be nice to have an in-browser
| one!
|
| [0]: https://github.com/statusfailed/gptlingo
| statusfailed wrote:
| OK I played with this some more, it's _so good_ - exactly what
| I dreamed of!!
|
| A couple more bits of feedback:
|
| (1) The "suggestion" / "I'm unsure" etc. feedback is
| _fantastic_
|
| (2) Word segmentation doesn't seem to be working properly, and
| so the context lookup doesn't work right. Example:
|
| Zhong Guo should be parsed as a single word ("china"), but
| it's parsed as individual characters ("middle", "kingdom").
|
| This means I have to tab out to a dictionary to look up words,
| and it's a bit annoying to select the right text.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Thanks! The tricky bit is to make this work in different
| languages where the "space" is not used to separate the
| different words, such as Chinese. We should implement a real
| Chinese lemmatizer there to chunk the words.
|
| Not sure if you saw it, but we already have pinyin in there.
| If you open up the settings and tick "show pronunciations"
| they will appear above the chat messages.
| yorwba wrote:
| > We should implement a real Chinese lemmatizer there to
| chunk the words.
|
| Or find all substrings that are listed in a dictionary
| ([?]everyone uses cc-cedict
| https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=cc-cedict )
| and give translations for all of them. That way, the user
| won't be limited to any particular chunking granularity,
| which is always a finicky aspect of word segmenters to
| fine-tune.
| statusfailed wrote:
| At least for chinese there are off-the-shelf word
| segmenters you can use like jieba[0]- I used it in gptlingo
| and it Just Works(TM).
|
| The "show pronounciations" setting just turns on pinyin
| above characters - what I want is to type pinyin and enter
| chinese characters. Actually showing the pinyin above
| characters is quite distracting!
|
| [0]: https://pypi.org/project/jieba/
| paulette449 wrote:
| "Unfortunately, the Safari Browser does not work well with
| recording audio. Use Chrome or Firefox instead."
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Yeah...sorry about that. It seems that Safari has become the
| new Internet Explorer
| sidcool wrote:
| Congrats on launching.
| zkid18 wrote:
| Cool, I am already practicing my written Brazilian Portuguese
| with ChatGPT, and I am eager to try out Univerbal! After trying
| both Italki and Preply a few times, I realized that I don't like
| tutoring platforms because they lack a structured approach to
| learning a language. While speaking is enjoyable, I don't feel
| like I'm making progress. I like how I can craft my own program
| and learning path in ChatGPT
| Hadjimina wrote:
| That's interesting. We have also seen that learners usually
| fall into one of two camps: 1) They know exactly what they want
| to learn. 2) They want to be guided and handed the next
| "lesson" after they completed the first.
|
| You definitely fall into camp 1
| ncfausti wrote:
| I've been building https://heylangley.com as a solo side project
| for a little while now. The initial MVP took about 2 months,
| though I have not had much time to market it. It's pretty much
| identical to this. I also applied to YC for W23 and was rejected.
|
| Not sure what else to say beyond this: if you have a project that
| you've been wanting to start, believe in yourself and build it!
| Hadjimina wrote:
| The thing that really made the difference for us was the
| traction we got through the original launch HN post.
| ncfausti wrote:
| re: DuoLingo, I always hear the same thing and feel the same
| reaction :) If you are looking for another team member I'd
| love to help.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| can you send me your details at philipp@univerbal.app
| NickC25 wrote:
| Neat app.
|
| How do you measure linguistic progress?
|
| >* The hard part intervenes when you try to replicate the
| progress tracking and tailoring of the curriculum.*
|
| Perhaps you guys just aren't thinking about it in the right way
| ;) Progress tracking and measurement is significantly easier from
| a conceptual standpoint than you might think. I'm not just
| bullshitting here - I've actually done it myself so I'm speaking
| from experience.
|
| Disclaimer: I've learned several languages over the course of my
| life; also co-founded a language learning company that used AI to
| help track and measure improvement. Oddly enough, someone from HN
| hit me up yesterday to ask about it. The company shut down in
| 2022 and I'm in a completely different industry now (non tech) so
| am fully able to talk about what we learned, where we made
| mistakes and where we innovated.
|
| Also, how do you teach things like slang, jargon, body language,
| hand movements, etc.. that are essential to effective social or
| professional communication in a given culture? Memorizing words,
| grammar and conjugations, etc... is great but is only a small
| part of the language learning journey.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Absolutely agree on the slang stuff. Progress tracking is hard
| to do at scale in completely open-ended conversations since
| there are so many degrees of freedom within one conversation.
| If you have any tips and tricks, these would be much
| appreciated :)
| NickC25 wrote:
| > _Progress tracking is hard to do at scale in completely
| open-ended conversations since there are so many degrees of
| freedom within one conversation._
|
| You're overthinking it, my friend. The solution is much
| simpler than you realize. Email me.
| yorwba wrote:
| Why not post the solution here in this thread? If you're
| going to write it out in an email anyways...
| merci_merci wrote:
| I tried logging in on Android but the confirmation email link
| just opens the app and does nothing. I've got 3 confirmation
| emails and same issue each time.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Nice! Well not nice since you're a bit stuck, but nice since we
| have heard of this issue but never were able to reproduce it.
| Can you click on the "check status" button? Does that fix the
| issue?
|
| Before being forwarded into the app did you open a website that
| had some text like "Your email is now confirmed"?
| merci_merci wrote:
| The "Check Status" button shows a loading indicator and then
| nothing happens. When I click the link in the email it brings
| me directly to the app, but just to the same screen I was on
| previously ("Verify your email to continue").
|
| I had an account previously (before the rename) and I'm using
| it to log in. Maybe it's something to do with that?
| kebsup wrote:
| I've built an MVP similar to this when GPTs came out, but somehow
| I just did not find it very appealing and I have the same
| experience with this one.
|
| I wonder if it's the delay or just the bleak conversation with an
| AI. Might get to usable level for me once LLMs get faster and
| more fun. (Twitter model maybe? :D)
| hrnnnnnn wrote:
| This is great. I've been using ChatGPT 3.5 for something similar,
| but the corrections and grammar explanations in this are much
| better!
| codersfocus wrote:
| Some feedback:
|
| When you start the intro, and it says "Hi, what language do you
| want to learn" the button should be labeled "Select..." not a
| default language. It was unclear I had to click it to select a
| different language.
|
| The languages in the app, and on your FAQ about which languages
| are available, aren't in sync.
| codersfocus wrote:
| One other thing is with alphabets. If I highlight over a word,
| and you could show me how to sound out the word in latin
| characters, that would be super helpful and no other language
| app I know of does that.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| What language were you learning? B.c. if you click on the
| settings you can already enable pronunciations (though only
| in some languages)
|
| The "Select..." makes a lot of sense
| poulpy123 wrote:
| That's interesting. I just ran a session in english to french
| starting by writing /replying in english then adding french words
| in the sentence at the end to see how it reacts.
|
| - The errors in my english sentences, mainly word order and
| missing articles, are involuntary and the corrections are
| reasonably coherent with deepl and deepl writer (that also uses
| AI).
|
| - the french words were correctly identified as french words, and
| the words were correctly translated, except maybe for one:
| "essentiellement" that I used in the meaning of "mainly" and was
| translated as "essentially" which I'm not sure it's the good
| choice
|
| in any case I add it to my bookmarks
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Could not have hoped for more :)
| grbsh wrote:
| Wow, I just tried it, and this is exactly what I've been looking
| for (something that actually makes you think conversationally,
| not just memorize vocabulary).
|
| Love the rebrand, by the way - I saw your posts about Quazle, and
| I never wanted to try it then for some reason. Can't really
| explain it, but I guess that's the power of branding right?
|
| One suggestion I would have is that it takes a while when I click
| on a word to get a definition. Is there a way you could preload
| definitions on device to make this faster? Sometimes I want to
| click like 7 words in a row, and I don't do that now because it's
| so slow.
| grbsh wrote:
| Also, I wouldn't really worry about Duolingo - they cater to
| people who want to _feel_ like they are learning a language
| (for 2-5 mins a day), not people who actually want to make
| progress. Even if they release features like this, they won't
| be competing with you. Duolingo is also the worst example of
| inappropriate gamification I've ever seen.
| losteric wrote:
| Duolingo is good at going from nothing to something. That's
| important.
|
| I noticed in this app, trying a language I don't know, I
| immediately get blocked on lesson 1 step 2 - my answer is
| wrong, but I know nothing and there are zero mechanisms to
| learn without prior context to guess and extrapolate upon.
| statusfailed wrote:
| > Duolingo is good at going from nothing to something
|
| Seconding this. I got noticeably better at Chinese after
| using duolingo every day. I feel like I hit a ceiling now
| and it's not helping too much, but it definitely worked.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Yeah, as a technical person, I was also surprised by what a big
| impact branding can make.
|
| Re:loading You can click on the message itself and you'll get
| the translation of the entire message. Preloading the
| translation of every word would be a bit costly, but we could
| probably squeeze a bit more performance out of it.
| hrududuu wrote:
| I'm just a hobbyist building tools for my own use (to learn
| Finnish), but I love the space, so happy to connect if you'd
| like: here's a video
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H_W6i4aa0Ak-vSAh99zYjJ4LcUT...
|
| My core task loops are phrase translation and audio
| transcription, and I've always been motivated by gamification and
| eventually data driven task selection
| userabchn wrote:
| Very impressive. My only comment is that it wasn't immediately
| clear whether I needed to click the microphone icon each time I
| wanted to respond or not.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| But when it was activated it was clear that it was activated.
| Or was should that also be shown more clearly?
| tobymather123 wrote:
| Hi guys, just tried this as an intermediate Chinese learner.
| Really love it overall. I have an IRL tutor as well and it's very
| interesting to compare. Happy to give feedback offline but high-
| level so far: 1. Adding pinyin for Chinese words when clicking
| would be great, and adding 'word' rather than character-only
| clickable dictionary, e.g. from Pleco. That's a Chinese specific
| issue 2. Harder, but when I say something wrong, pause, and re-
| state, if it could fix my answer with what I said and delete the
| wrong bit that would be insanely cool. As that's what a teacher
| hears, the self-correcting is a good sign
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Pinyin is already accessible if you click on the gear icon in
| the top right and enable "pronunciations". When you make a
| mistake you can also have a look at it, read the suggestion and
| the "correct it" by clicking on the correction button and
| repeating the correct version of it. That will make the error
| disappear.
|
| I guess both of these issues are too hidden right now.
| tobymather123 wrote:
| They were but TIL! Will set that up
| tobymather123 wrote:
| ah no sorry, I meant pinyin when you click the character,
| right now it's just a translation of that character. I
| don't want permanently visible pinyin of the line
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Ahhh fair enough
| SorrisoAmarelo wrote:
| Hi Philipp I think that the sooner Univerbal is on the market the
| better - it's marketable as it is. Just needs finishing touches
| to the layouts, buttons etc. Leave gamification and even the
| "progress tracking and tailoring of the curriculum" until you
| have a viable product and have made your presence known online.
|
| You have a unique product to market i.e. interaction with a
| tutor, through speaking and having the replies read out loud +
| it's available whenever you want, affordable to everyone. All the
| other language courses do not have this.
|
| As for games, they can be a separate section, just as you already
| have buttons for Tutor, Translator, Hints etc.
|
| I have contacted you on your website with a question about using
| Univerbal on a desktop.
|
| Good luck!
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Yeah, that makes sense. Checking my inbox now!
| bricee98 wrote:
| I like the idea, but when I started practicing some Spanish, I
| noticed it gave me incorrect grammar advice (it claimed that the
| subjunctive form of "creer" is "creen" - it was right that the
| subjunctive was needed, but that would be "crean"). That makes me
| nervous to use it for a language that I know less well like
| Korean because I won't be able to tell if the grammar feedback
| I'm getting is accurate.
|
| If there's a way to make it more robust on that front I could
| definitely see myself using it!
| Hadjimina wrote:
| We're using LLMs and good ol'ML. These systems are never going
| to be 100% accurate. Then again humans are also not 100%
| correct and we're working hard on ironing out the kinks like
| the one you just discovered.
| jairuhme wrote:
| How are you guys assessing the accuracy? Sure, LLM's aren't
| going to be 100% accurate. But if I pick up a Spanish
| textbook, there is a right answer 100% of the time (okay,
| aside from publishing errors)
| mrtesthah wrote:
| If you can't make any promises as to the quality of what
| you're offering, then how can you reasonably expect people to
| pay for it? At the end of the day you need to be able to tell
| consumers what they can reasonably expect from your product
| in terms of its capabilities and accuracy.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| > One thing I'd love to get HN's opinion on is how much
| gamification you think we should add.
|
| It would be very nice if any such gamification were optional. I
| personally don't want to win awards or other internet points - I
| want to learn a language.
| ninjaa wrote:
| This is super great. The core mechanic is absurdly great and
| works much much better than I expected.
|
| I also see that it's not an end-to-end language tutoring solution
| but a companion you can use to test your real-world language
| skills. Awesome stuff.
|
| If you're interested in reaching out to real language schools, I
| run a marketplace for pre-college programs, Language Schools are
| like 20-30% of our business. Let me know!
| Hadjimina wrote:
| I'm not sure how I can reach out, I did not find an email
| address. Can you ping me at philipp@univerbal.app?
| keeptrying wrote:
| Great stuff. Spoken language learning is definitely the weak
| point of companeis like Duolingo and is the part of the language
| learning that most people want in the first place.
|
| That lag in the video is still a bit too long.
|
| If you can get that down to nearly instantaneous, I think this
| would have a lot of appeal.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Especially for people who are already fluent in a language, the
| lag can be a tad too long. For beginners, it's more ok since
| you get a nice "break".
| emursebrian wrote:
| As the founder of a startup focused on language learning, I am
| really interested in how AI could improve the experience. At this
| stage, I think it is pretty far off from being useful as a
| conversation-partner/tutor replacement.
|
| I agree with most of your assessment on tutoring, but replacing
| the human and emotional connection with a person isn't something
| that will be easily replicated (or at all!) with AI. I've been
| successful in hiring tutors that I've liked and tailoring the
| curriculum to meet my needs. You do need to put in the work, but
| coming prepared with a curriculum and what I want to learn in
| each lesson has been very effective for me. I've also tried to
| pick tutors with similar interests so that the conversation is
| interesting and engaging.
|
| I prefer my tutoring sessions to be mostly conversation, but I
| usually reserve some time in the beginning of the session to ask
| questions about grammar or to review something I have written. I
| mostly used non-professional tutors who were doing the tutoring
| to make a little extra money on the side, so at times schedules
| would change and I would need to find a tutor. There was
| definitely some time lost in getting to know a new tutor and
| getting back into the flow of things.
|
| Building a curriculum or taking detailed notes after and during a
| lesson aren't things every student is going to have the ability
| or desire to do. These are a couple of aspects we would like to
| improve with Emurse. Marry one-on-one tutoring with self-paced
| instruction. Track what was learned in your one-on-one tutoring
| sessions in the app and create continuity between sessions and
| different tutors.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| The personal relationship is a tricky bit and definitely plays
| a huge role in tutoring. There are already AI apps out there
| that try to mimic a human like relationship (e.g.
| https://replika.com/) but it's unclear how/if this type of
| relationship also works for tutoring.
| Tistron wrote:
| I am curious to try it, but I can't get it to work (trying the
| free web one in chrome on macOS. The console is full of errors, a
| lot of them this: @firebase/app-check:
| FirebaseError: AppCheck: ReCAPTCHA error. (appCheck/recaptcha-
| error)
|
| and then also this: Access to fetch at
| 'https://europe-west1-nextjs-
| yak.cloudfunctions.net/updateProficiency' from origin
| 'https://chat.univerbal.app' 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. If an opaque response serves your needs, set
| the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS
| disabled.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Yeah, we should probably clean up the logs. However, I was
| unable to reproduce the issue. Can you send a recording to me
| and then I'll investigate philipp@univerbal.app
| Tistron wrote:
| done
| webappguy wrote:
| I tried with the Chinese in the app and a lot of times at timed
| out, or went exceedingly fast, I see the snail, but it might seem
| like cart before the horse to do full Chinese sentences for a
| beginner. Maybe not and this is proven I'm not sure, but I can
| say that you act needs some slight tweaks, especially always the
| pronunciation over top of the Chinese characters. What's the
| point of serving a chat bubble with Chinese characters to a
| person that is just learning Chinese? Maybe even the English
| translation below the Chinese characters and the Chinese
| pronunciation above. This has huge promise though
| pedalpete wrote:
| Pretty good first experience. I was unsure about the UX of the
| mic and couldn't quite tell when it was recording my voice, and
| when it was waiting for me to hit the button.
| apatil wrote:
| I've used chatgpt itself as a language tutor a bit but this is
| nicer. I like the inline suggestions that don't break the flow of
| conversation.
|
| Portuguese speech to text is flaky. This may be partly
| attributable to my pronunciation, and chatgpt has the same issue.
|
| I'd love to have a hands free mode that's suitable for use while
| doing chores or driving.
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