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Ask HN: Chat bots (Speech) for learning a new language.

5 points by c4urself ↗ HN
tl;dr; Combine the pros of a language buddy with chat bot software.

I'm in the process of learning Chinese from my wife, and love the interaction, but there is a point in time where your language partner doesn't want to repeat something to you for the umpteenth time (while that's exactly what's required to learn a language). Could a speech chat bot take over such a process? I'm thinking a lesson would be the user trying to get information out of the chat bot. Does something like this exist? Would it be feasible? An alternative like a (Text) chat bot would also work for some languages.

5 comments

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mushy
How do plan for the bot to reply in? Traditional chinese characters or han yu pin yin?
c4urself
well i guess for the text based one it could be either. i assume most? people use hanyu pinyin to input characters anyway. but a speech bot would be more interesting.
akavi
A slight tangent, but this is a personal peeve of mine: There should not be a space between syllables of the same word in pinyin.

Ie, it should be written "hanyu pinyin".

auganov
As a product it's a great idea, I'm sure it would sell very well. As an effective learning tool I'm not so sure. Unless you could implement top notch speech recognition it would not do too much in improving your speech. And so far I'm yet to see English speech recognition software that would be suitable for such a purpose. The situation is even worse in case of Mandarin (and probably Cantonese too). Mandarin speech recognition that is out there is not suitable for anything more than simple voice-commands, at least last time I searched.

Generally speaking I'm not an advocate of practising speech before attaining a certain, relatively high level of proficiency. But that's a completely different matter.

A text bot from a technical standpoint would be completely doable and should be a good product as well. You could actually build a pretty sophisticated course utilizing that text bot, a lot of people would be interested I'm sure.