Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking (gliglish.com)
When learning foreign languages, I made the most progress by speaking them throughout the day, every day. So I made a site where you can *speak* to an AI language teacher to practice both listening and speaking.
# The product
*What I have now:*
* Multilingual speech recognition: You can ask a question in English and get an answer in your target language. * Feedback on your grammar. * Suggestions: See examples of what to say next to keep the conversation flowing. * Speed: Choose a lower speed for beginners or a faster one for advanced levels. * Translations: Click to see a translation into English (or another language). * Role-playing: Practice real-life situations. * Available to learn American English, British English, Australian English, French, Spanish from Spain, Spanish from Mexico, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Russian, and more.
*What I'd like to add:*
* More Situations/Characters/Customizations: A "Creator mode". * Feedback on your pronunciation. * Text-based responses (Type or click – would feel like a "Create Your Own Adventure" book!) * A dictionary. * Phonetics: Zoom in and repeat a sound to help you hear phonemes and words more clearly. * …and so much more!…
# The startup
Been working on this for 6-7 months now.
I love this project and got lots of laudatory comments about it, but still find it hard to make it take off. 31% of people come back to it, traffic is growing through word of mouth with language teachers in schools or Telegram or private intranets sharing it with others. So that's nice. But nice words alone don't pay the bills.
My goal is to achieve enough growth to cover costs, which would then allow me to focus 100% on the product (currently it's more like 50% of my time). But I'm not there yet.
A challenge I see is that most places forbid self-promotion. So I'm just not sure how on Earth I'm supposed to have a product take off. I could pay for ads, but I use AdBlock everywhere so this feels out of character. I'm a big fan of Pieter Levels (@levelsio on Twitter) because he's doing things solo, so I'm trying to emulate the same kind of success. But it seems that something is missing.
What features would you find most useful? How can I better market this without resorting to ads?
Thanks for reading! If you've got thoughts or ideas, I would love to hear them.
Cheers, Fabien
110 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadWas it just easy to offer or is there more of a connection.
My wife is Bosnian and I have learned some over the years.
How do you feel about your pronunciation of Bosnian? Could you get your wife to try it? How
The elephant in the room with language education is that it's tough to learn clear pronunciation even though it's super useful. Things get a bit messed up with speech recognition:
1. Speech recognition is designed to understand no matter what (which is kinda stupid – in natural language when things are incomprehensible [because of noise, lack of context, mispronunciation, or whatever we just ASK people to repeat]
2. Speech recognition is trained on native speakers most of the time. But it would make sense to do two opposite things: 1) train it on non-native speakers as well (to improve performance), things are getting there… 2) train it to correct non-native speakers (some projects in that direction too, mostly for English.)
I'll add my own layer of checks to handle such cases. So that when speech recognition goes wrong (as it inevitably will – with HIGH variability between different contexts and speakers) the teacher does not get off track because of it.
Sorry this got so long!
Thank you for sharing your feedback :)
-- 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.
Alternatively, it might be nice to be able to translate only individual words. If I understood 60% , inferred 35%, and was clueless about 5% of a foreign text, I think I'd end up learning more by using the smallest amount of translation possible and only translating the word I was stuck on.
It would also be nice to see support for more widely spoken languages. Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Hindi could be your killer apps -- If supporting non-latin text is a bottleneck, you could launch these languages in beta with some features disabled!
Overall, great product OP! This is definitely good enough to start charging for. Spending 5 minutes a day speaking Spanish is a very appealing idea for me. As silly as it sounds, I'd try selling door to door (in person) for the first few users. I think that could be much more effective for early stages. You should also consider adding a intermediate tier for people in lower income countries.
I will keep your site bookmarked -- I tested it for Spanish, but the language I really want to learn Arabic. If you can add Arabic language support, I will be the first person to sign up!
Will add Japanese and Chinese momentarily.
Which variation of Arabic would you want to learn?
You make a good point. I might need to hire a salesperson or do a business deal for this.
- If you make it too easy, like jjkeddo199 pointed out you don't learn. e.g. it's much more useful to watch a movie and understand say 60-70% of it than to have your work cutout for you and understand everything with subtitles.
- But this also depends on the current level you're at… And getting the difficulty just right is what gets people to feel good, learn and be "in the zone" (FLOW)! Such a good feeling!
- It's more beneficial to use THE FEW WORDS ONE KNOWS than to spread oneself too thin, seeing too many words and reading too much translated text. Time spent 100% in the language is super valuable. Story time: when I first lived in Hungary I talked like a 2-year old, but became fluent (in the sense of fast, no need to think) on ultra-limited topics in two months. This created a solid basis I was later able to build on. It's a method that works.
- At times, only translations will make a meaning crystal clear.
But I may also be at a bit of a disconnect. I learn languages by just pushing through, but not everyone has the same learning style (my wife is much more organized and does just as well.)
Sorry if this turned into a ramble…
Anyway… Would love to know what people's experience and feelings are with the whole shebang of translation.
- 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
[1] https://barbariangrunge.substack.com/
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.
That's not even the only issue. I took some strictly conversational classes for a while, but the problem is that it's one teacher with 5-10 students, so most of the speaking and conversing is done with people who suck as bad as you do at the language! The thing I really liked about your site (and just some of my own practicing that I've done with ChatGPT) is that I really get to converse with solely a dedicated "fluent" speaker.
Again, thanks and great job!
Will try to build on this positive, thank you!
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.
Gotta look into language schools, you're right… Someone suggested doing a deal with the Canadian government because everything is bilingual there.
Big life decisions of working on the product vs. working to promote it. Balance is hard
> And the limitations of its speech recognition are actually a feature - it forces me to really concentrate on pronunciation
I appreciate the positive comment! People complaining about the limitations of speech recognition make a valid point, but there's an ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM of language education that I feel needs to be addressed:
Language classes ignore speaking for the most part. Speaking time is ultra-limited. Phonetics are introduced super late (or never). And text is used as a form of baby-sitting to the detriment of listening (which is really –literally– backwards because the natural order of picking up a language is as follows: 1. listening 2. speaking 3. reading 4. writing.)
There's a cost to it: most people develop a fear of speaking and a confusing accent.
We can see the current limits with speech recognition and say that it and the products that use it are no good. But this feels like throwing the baby with the bathwater.
Or, we can seize it as an opportunity to improve one's accent. (Spent thousands of bucks on accent training, this is much cheaper! )
(I do plan to improve speech recognition as tech matures (fast), but there's an opportunity for improving one's accent here that would be too bad to miss.)
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.
Hopefully language teachers won't be gone, but it definitely will change the industry. It's a bit like the music industry maybe? People don't buy CDs, but they go to concerts. Language teachers for their part might have better students, eager to talk and for human contact.
Multilingual speech recognition is proving both a curse and a blessing. I will:
1. Turn it off by default 2. Ask people for their native and target language so as to detect when things go wrong. In which case, I'd give a second shot at transcribing and, if nothing comes out of it, just ask you to repeat nicely. (As it happens in real conversations.)
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!
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.
1. Would having translations of the suggestions help? I obviously want to add them (along with their pronunciations), but have had to do other things first.
2. Like I said in the OP, I want to add an option to type and click.
Need to share something: I've taught English for decades and learned four foreign languages and the biggest mistake I've seen others and me do is to read too much and speak too little. Students who study a language for years before speaking develop apprehension and bad habits that take years to fix.
Wanna strike a balance between the need/encouragements to speak and the flexibility to use a tool however one wants to use it.
I appreciate that! I do have a lot of trouble with that but I also tend to mostly be a text-based communicator if I can help it lol
> I think there are a few places where you need to fine tune your prompts, at least for Korean language learning
Can you expand on this one, please?
> I also wish there was a drill mode that is less open ended
I have something similar to a drill mode in my previous product (to learn English) and people use it 1-3 hours a day. Want to incorporate it into Gliglish, just didn't get around to it yet but you make me realize I shouldn't wait!
Is your project KoalaSRS?
Indeed it is! Very much a work-in-progress though, whenever my work schedule has a moment to spare.
> I have something similar to a drill mode in my previous product (to learn English) and people use it 1-3 hours a day. Want to incorporate it into Gliglish, just didn't get around to it yet but you make me realize I shouldn't wait!
I look forward to trying it in the future. I'm a fan of tools that let me just "plug in" and immerse for a solid hour via short drills. I wish there was a GPT-enhanced tool like using Anki, but for vocab drills and speaking practice. This was my main motivation for working on KoalaSRS
> Can you expand on this one, please?
Absolutely! When I tried the bakery scenario, I used the Korean word for "bread" but it got misinterpreted as "bell". It's not solely a transcription error (my pronunciation could use a little touch up), but I'm curious if you're using OpenAI's Whisper? If so, implementing a dynamic/context-aware prompt might improve the accuracy, and even overlook minor pronunciation glitches. I've done some tinkering in this area during my own experiments and saw some promising improvements. I'm not sure if you're using Whisper or if you've tweaked your Whisper prompts based on context, but I thought I'd mention that experience to see if it helps you tweak things a bit.
Thanks for your reply. If you ever feel like diving deeper, don't hesitate to reach out. I absolutely love discussing language learning software. I've shared some of my thoughts on my blog and in the KoalaSRS README as well, so feel free to take a peek if you're curious!
- 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!
1. Wanna go full-in on customization. Right now you can customize by telling the teacher what you want to talk about, but I can imagine in the near future the AI figuring where you stand and adapting as you go along. Matter of (coding) time.
2. You're right. I will add translations and audio to the suggestions. Something more urgent always came up but your feedback helps prioritize this.
3. Could you expand on this? Do you mean in terms of waiting for the answer? I've experience slowdowns when OpenAI is over capacity but generally it works well. Do you mind sharing where you used it from (country)?
4. Thank you, this is encouraging.
Super excited about all this!
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/
r/languagelearning/ does not currently accept anything relating to AI. Here's the messages I got:
Automatically:
> Thank you for posting on r/languagelearning. Due to their frequency, posts relating to AI and chat bots have been banned from the sub.
And from the mods:
> Hello--it does look good. Unfortunately, we currently are severely curbing chatbot posts.
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.
Not sure what hating on 'AI' and 'scalable' (your word by the way, not mine) accomplishes.
- On the one hand, it performs well in so many cases… and having multilingual support built-in is great! - On the other hand: there's actually NO OPTION to Whisper to recognize just two languages (you either recognize ONE language or ANY language with it, which can cause issues depending on one's pronunciation and the language at hand.)
Will definitely turn OFF multilingual speech recognition by default, because the huge majority of negative reactions in this thread stem from this.
1) Speech to text into an input field, allow the user to modify
2) I presume this is uses an LLM to generate the responses, submit the new text and give it the entire convo as context but initially ask it to "correct" the text to what would make sense in context based on similar sounding words.
Edit: Hah oh it's not too great right now at all. Tried it again and it ended up writing Cyrillic as my response despite me speaking Spanish.
For the creator: Do not get discouraged, I hope you do get this working properly and see a lot of traction.
Even in its current state this is an awesome product. There are so so many people in the world learning a language, and one of the hardest parts is practicing after you stop learning (like you leaving Spain). People like that will really love something like this
In future especially to be able to cater to people who are still learning, it should be feasible to use a similar product to train and correct people's pronounciation.
Speech recognition is far from perfect but even then it's incredibly useful. It CAN be infuriating (or downright hilarious). Hell, it's infuriating when occasionally a (human!) waiter switches to English after I mangled a sound in Hungarian, even though I'm C1/advanced in the language.
Problem or opportunity? Like someone else pointed out, the limitations of speech-to-text can be turned into an opportunity to improve one's pronunciation. It's getting extremely good for native speakers. As foreign speakers it's a chance to improve.
In any case, I'm sure I can add a layer or two to the code to reduce misunderstandings. This is actually exciting!
p.s. as mentioned in the OP, feedback on pronunciation is planned (actually in the works).
Not sure how I can learn anything from this.
It doesn't even tell us what to make of, gee, all those funny umlauts and stuff. I suppose I'll just have to guess.
Like most language apps - better than absolutely nothing, but on balance - pretty awful.
(Partial apologies to the creator -- I know you've worked hard on this. But still -- these are my impressions).
I'll also add voice and translations to the suggestions provided on every screen.
It's also a matter of learning style... I don't speak a word of Portuguese or Bosnian, but diving into those was a lot of fun! Language learning can be seen like a detective game and it's super exciting then.
In any case, will definitely try to accommodate more learning styles and personality types.
How do you feel about your accent? Did you try with multilingual speech recognition off?
I love the idea though!
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?