[HN Gopher] English learners can now practice speaking on Google...
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       English learners can now practice speaking on Google Search
        
       Author : teleforce
       Score  : 55 points
       Date   : 2024-05-08 21:09 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (research.google)
 (TXT) w3m dump (research.google)
        
       | Vox_Leone wrote:
       | Additional data points. Now Google also knows your vocal profile
       | and any subtle stress factors -- or lack thereof -- emerging in
       | the context of each topic/theme used in your practicing, as well
       | as your proficiency level and your learning rate. Not bad.
        
         | duringmath wrote:
         | And what's the commercial application of all this stressed
         | syllable data?
        
         | cafed00d wrote:
         | That's a bit too cynical. I agree the nefarious data guzzler of
         | an ad machine is siphoning up that voice data but hey if that's
         | all they wanted they had Google Fi/Voice etc.
         | 
         | This definitely seems like a Google building products people
         | will love. Let's just hope they don't kill it in 2
         | days/weeks/months/years
        
       | lxgr wrote:
       | Really cool, but why on earth is this in Google Search and not
       | Translate?!
        
         | nicce wrote:
         | To get wider audience? Don't know why they want that. Some
         | audio data collecting?
        
         | lupire wrote:
         | Search, Assistant, Google, Gemini, ... It's all gSiri
        
         | notarealllama wrote:
         | "Do one thing well", a common Linux design philosophy, was
         | blatantly ignored here. Search is not the place for this,
         | sibling comment is likely right about trying to reach wider
         | audience.
         | 
         | Claude.ai and chatGPT have become my go to for translation over
         | Google Translate, they provide better idiomatic context. They
         | aren't perfect for code, but I can chat with them in target
         | languages (outside of English) and they're pretty fluent.
        
         | jeffbee wrote:
         | Better question is why the Google app exists. It's just a
         | platform for kitchen sink projects that they could not be
         | bothered to wrap a whole app around.
        
       | atum47 wrote:
       | In a way, I've been using Google tools to improving my english
       | for a while now. A while back I was way more active on youtube,
       | recording videos of my projects speaking english. I would then
       | see the auto generated captions to see if the model had some
       | trouble understanding what I was saying. Most of the time it was
       | ok. Since I saw the model misunderstanding native english
       | speakers as well.
        
       | hu3 wrote:
       | That's one way to gather massive amounts of high quality audio
       | data to train their own Whisper AI.
       | 
       | I like it. It's a win win in my book.
        
         | daniel_reetz wrote:
         | Exactly as they did with GOOG-411, which was used to build a
         | huge phoneme database.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
        
         | jeffbee wrote:
         | Why would you want to collect training data from English
         | learners?
        
           | lb4r wrote:
           | Because a lot of English is spoken by non-native speakers.
        
         | mhh__ wrote:
         | ... they own youtube
        
       | alanzhuly wrote:
       | Beautiful, practice acting when?
        
       | anArbitraryOne wrote:
       | I used to use google's voice recognition a lot when learning
       | Chinese. I would whip myself when it didn't understand me.
       | 
       | So my horrible pronunciation is probably in the training data.
        
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       (page generated 2024-05-08 23:00 UTC)