Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
So here&#x27;s some more balanced feedback, if you will (playing with a language I know quite well already):<p>On the positive side: the bot itself has excellent voice quality (it still sounds bot-like -- but people expect that) and makes very few pronunciation mistakes (I only noticed one).   Its vocal recognition is, I would say ... not great, but good enough (it recognizes well enough if I say simple, standard things, but it easily confused if I use less common -- but also perfectly correct -- formulations).   At least, vocal recognition as such is not its weakest spot.<p>You can ask it questions about fairly detailed topics and get reasonably correct answers most of the time (as with GPT, which I&#x27;m guessing is its backend).  It can sometimes give you very nuanced feedback as to your diction and usage (it will notice when you&#x27;re using a formulation that is correct but not standard, and give you a detailed explanation as to why).<p>However, what I don&#x27;t like -- and what made me ultimately decide not to invest further time with the app at present:<p>(1) You can easily feel lost (in &quot;Teacher&quot; mode) because all it can do is answer questions -- it isn&#x27;t guiding you anywhere, and you have to already know what questions to ask.<p>(2) Even so, I thought to myself -- &quot;well I can see how a good Q+A bot can be useful -- let&#x27;s see what we can do with it&quot;.  And here&#x27;s where I got most disappointed.<p>I told it I wanted to practice my pronunciation -- and first asked for it to come up with some sample sentences, and then thought of one of my own -- one of those sentences you would say to someone at the family dinner table to try to wow them with your language skills.<p>In both drills, I played a little trick on the poor bot -- I <i>deliberately</i> mispronounced the sentences, the way a stereotypical Ugly American would -- basically mangling every single syllable in some obvious way, hoping to get a long list of corrections from the bot.<p>And it totally failed at this task.  It kept saying &quot;You said that perfectly!  Well done!&quot; or some variant.  When I knew for a fact that my pronunciation was an epic fail, and I would have greatly embarrassed myself at that family holiday dinner.<p>(3) But things got even weirder when I tried to tell the bot &quot;Wait you&#x27;re wrong, I actually made lots of mistakes.&quot;  More than half the time it would get horribly confused, sometimes telling me -again- that I said that sentence perfectly, sometimes &quot;correcting&quot; its own sentence.<p>So it&#x27;s quite scatterbrained (just like GPT-4 is, when you try to make it backtrack and acknowledge some kind of mistake).  It also misunderstands questions about grammar if I ask it to explain something it just said, or which I said in a sentence previously.<p>Bottom line -- it&#x27;s a very mixed bag.  Partially quite impressive -- but far too often, extremely frustrating to work with.  Once one gets past the &quot;wow!&quot; aspect  of working with a bot that seems well-spoken and (quantitatively) seems to have a lot of knowledge about grammar and usage -- the frustration arising from its scatterbrained-ness, and more fundamentally, just never knowing if I can really trust its answers takes over.<p>On the whole it just grinds my gears ... like pretty much any other chat bot I&#x27;ve attempted to try to get useful information out of.<p>That and again -- it isn&#x27;t guiding you anywhere.  If it can&#x27;t reliably keep track of what it just said (or what I just said), it&#x27;s definitely not going to be able to assess my progress, or tell me how to improve (beyond the random piece of generic advice it doles when it doesn&#x27;t have anything better to say).<p>Of course it won&#x27;t.  It&#x27;s just a transformer bot, after all.  And the technology is categorically nowhere capable of doing that.