Launch HN: Univerbal (YC W23) – Language learning with a conversational AI tutor
2 years ago
Hi HN we’re David, Sam and Philipp and we’re building Univerbal (https://chat.univerbal.app
2 years ago
Hi HN we’re David, Sam and Philipp and we’re building Univerbal (https://chat.univerbal.app
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!
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.
That is true of LLMs, but if you’re looking to replace iTalki, the standard to meet or beat on grammar correctness and explanation is that of a human instructor - this is not the type of mistake that my native tutor would make, and if he somehow did, I would find a new tutor that I could be confident is teaching me correct grammar.
I certainly don’t point it out to be discouraging - on the contrary, I feel like I am the exact target audience for a product like this and would happily pay for it if it can reach or be near the trustworthiness of a human teacher.
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)
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.
It could be somewhat embarassing for someone who trusts the app and then says the wrong thing to another human. As an off-the-cuff idea (not because you haven't already thought deeply but because I hate to find a problem without offering a solution), maybe use videos of real speakers for basic instruction, then the AI for responsive lessons, etc.?
As you no doubt have considered, but if you define you mission by the tool (AI) and not the outcome (accurate, faster language acquisition) you'll have a great tool and lesser outcomes. Whatever you prioritize, that's what you'll get! :)
This looks very interesting and I wish you guys the best. One suggestion - a nitpick usually that I wouldn't write, but because it's a language product, you want to give the right impression of your language skills:
In English, uni-, the prefix, means 'one'. For example, unidirectional doesn't mean 'all directions', it means 'one direction'. [0] The name of the app means something like 'one language' or 'one word'. Again, normally, who cares? But this is a language service and people need to perceive you as authorities on language whom they will trust. I read the name and thought, 'well maybe they are great programmers but they aren't using serious linguists'.
You might want omni-, such as Omniverbal, 'all words'; or ambi-, Ambiverbal, 'both words' (reflecting both languages, the learner's native language and the one they are being taught, and 'ambidextrous' - able to use both hands equally well). Both sound like fun words to me (but I'm not in marketing!).
[0] People sometimes think of uni- as all, I think because they think of the Universe and universal (from which I assume 'Univerbal' is derived). Perhaps another way of thinking of universe / universal is meaning 'the single complete thing' or 'the single thing containing everything'.
By that logic, "one language" is actually apt for an app like this, a la 1Password. I.e. one way to interpret is: the service democratizes access to languages so much that one language is all you need to start learning, or all languages are as accessible and as easy to learn as a single language.
I strongly disagree. Univerbal is a much better name than Omniverbal/Ambiverbal.
Help us out - why?
To what extent do you encounter hallucinations of foreign-language grammar (or vocabulary)? It looks like one person here is complaining that the application has hallucinated a non-existent verb form in one context.
That would be my biggest fear about using a language model for foreign language study ... being taught something wrong or significantly unidiomatic (perhaps by example), and then having to unlearn it later on.
It would be surprising to me if it consistently made this error. It may well correct you (and contradict itself) if you later used the word incorrectly. A human tutor might be less likely to make a mistake, but they would probably also get it wrong more consistently if they did.
As usual with language models, I think the key is to learn to live with their limitations as well as their strengths.
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
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.
They were but TIL! Will set that up
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Very much something I'm interested in.
The problem I have is it jumps straight in at a level that is too high for me, I literally can't answer the basic questions you start with. I need more basic introductions and foundations, perhaps this is only an app I can come too once I've studied to a certain level elsewhere?
I'll second this. Jumping straight into a conversation is also pretty stressful. You ask, "Have you practiced conversations before" but answering "Yes" doesn't mean I'm any good at them. I'd like to start with lessons not free form conversation.
Also, please for the love of god remove the 'streak' mechanic. There is nothing more demotivating than breaking a long streak and it's why I don't use Duolingo.
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)
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.
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".
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.
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 :)
>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.
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It’s a great idea. I’m learning Finnish via the chat and noticed some issues.
- invitation email link is huge, does it need so much entropy
- the web application is borked on iOS (no audio recording, buttons don’t work)
- inline translation of my spoken Finnish just says “I’m unsure”
- despite knowing my name from the introduction, the app keeps translating my name as “grilli“
- after finishing the introductory lesson, I had to close and re-open the app for the next lesson to display
- it almost seems like the app is trying to translate my spoken input to English despite the conversation being in Finnish
Overall, I like the idea and will continue trying the app. I’m not convinced enough yet to pay 14€/month but will give it some more time.
I like that the app doesn’t focus on grammar or gamification. Grammar comes after learning a language since the initial learning is all about I/O and grammar mostly makes sense when you already “get it.” Gamification and other addiction mechanics are what put me off of Duolingo as it doesn’t feel good to be manipulated, even if for a “good reason.”
Yeah, we should make it clearer that the web app is not supported on mobile devices. You can get the app and then it should work way smoother.
We currently have a bug in the homescreen which should be resolved in the next update and you should no longer need to close & re-open the app to get the next conversation.
If you get the yearly subscription it's only 10/m ;)
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!
Yeah, that makes sense. Checking my inbox now!
Please reply to my email ty
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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
Could not have hoped for more :)
The other company in this space I've been following is Speak (https://www.speak.com/). Aside from supported languages, how is Univerbal different?
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.
When learning a new language, you should always go for Swiss guys. we have four national languages ;)
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
Nice to see you here. I have been following your YouTube channel for a while, yes I think I discovered your channel via your videos about learning languages with ChatGPT (I'm building a language learning app as well so IIRC I was researching about it).
Thanks! If you’d like to discuss ideas for your app, feel free to get in touch. I’m always happy to chat about such topics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last year, I traveled to Colombia and spent a couple of weeks there. To brush up on my Spanish before the trip, I hired a tutor that lived near where I was staying. Besides being tutored, I was able to get suggestions on getting around, places to sight-see, where to get the best street food, places to avoid a night, etc.
Sure, an AI could provide some of that but it is only going to be as comprehensive as the set of data it was trained on or what it could look up online. My tutor even offered to show me around when I was visiting. An AI will not be able to replicate that.
Feedback on doing an assessment:
1) The assessment felt a little long.
2) There were many transcription errors which really was not a good experience. Are you using a quality transcription like insanely-fast-whisper?
2a) Why do I need to see my speech transcribed in real-time? It's distracting and leads to worse quality transcription.
3) It would be great to have accent coaching. From a transcription you should be able to figure out tone, inflection, and phonemes, and find the grossest errors to point out.
Noted!
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.
I have found myself legit using this instead of duolingo for the past couple of days, in spite of the speech to text issues. It feels like a better way to learn. The inline suggestions, in particular, seem like they will help me quickly move through bad habits and mistakes in order of severity.
The tutor review at the end of the lesson doesn't feel as useful currently; its content isn't particularly actionable. Maybe if it gave me a couple of exercises or something?
You can actually set the chat settings to automatic recording and even decide after how many seconds of not saying anything, the message should be automatically sent. Just check out the chat settings on the top right ;)
The auto submit slider doesn't work for me (on Android) but I can imagine what it would be like. I don't think the Portuguese speech to text is good enough for the app to be usable hands free even if the slider did work. For example, it just transcribed
"Eu quero ir a assistir ao filme." (which is almost correct)
as
"Eu quero ia AA chistian ao filme."
These errors have to be corrected by typing.
Hey, just so you know, it seems like it's possible to get stuck during the onboarding journey (No option but to refresh the page)
I tried the app using the 'no account' option. At the end of the exercise, it asked me to sign up to see my results. Clicking on 'sign up', I filled in my details only to find out that the email apparently already is in use (clearly, I've forgotten signing up). It recommends I should try logging in instead. However, there is no way for the user to log in at this point without losing the test task and totally restarting the journey.
https://imgur.com/a/zrzhMU6
Please consider adding a way out, with either a close dialogue option or a path to login/forgotten password flow
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:
and then also this:
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
done
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.
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
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.
Some feedback from my wife, who started using Quazel to practice French after your previous Show HN:
---
Gameification sounds like something that should be either left for later, or very subtle. It's a great product as is. Maybe later you could have different trouble words fly at the user like soap bubbles and you have to say the word twice to pop them. That might make the drilling/practice more fun. A reward could be a joke in the language they are trying to learn?
Another user left a comment about being distracted by seeing their words written out as they talk. I need that feature left in because on occasion the microphone thinks I've said one thing, and really I have said another. It's rare, and completely due to my accent, but it does happen
Great stuff and no worries, we'll probably leave the transcription as is.
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!
Yep, I agree that could be made clearer.
> 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.
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
you can always get the translation of the full message by pressing the icon on the right side of the chat bubble :)
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?
I had the same issue. I've been looking for good ways to learn Hindi.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
Thank you for the hints! All of those are noted and will be fixed asap. We absolutely agree regarding the gamification :)
Re:Pricing, I mentioned something around it in the HN launch. Currently the price is 10-is USD/month.
Tried Portuguese from Portugal and it's immediately obvious that it's wrong. It uses Brazilian Portuguese grammar, just the tts is a portuguese voice.
As someone looking to learn European Portuguese this is a constant pain with most language apps.
I tried your app. One thing that came to me was active feedback which is so important for just learning in general. The app does this well by suggestions or corrections. However, for the former it would be nice to have variations or drafts like Bard does as variations are possible. For correctness, not so much as grammar is grammar but it would be interesting to see a feature for pronunciation or accent correction. (yeah, that’s a hard one)
Sorry but this is utterly pointless. One of the very first sentences I was given was grammatically incorrect ("My name Natalie."). The speaker's voice sounds terrible and robotic. The voice recognition is likewise terrible. The pauses are way too long. One of the worst language learning websites I've ever seen. You'd be much better off just talking to ChatGPT via conversation mode in the app.
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!
The thing that really made the difference for us was the traction we got through the original launch HN post.
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.
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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?
Good point
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
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
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!
I'm not sure how I can reach out, I did not find an email address. Can you ping me at philipp@univerbal.app?
This is great. I've been using ChatGPT 3.5 for something similar, but the corrections and grammar explanations in this are much better!
I have encountered a problem on Android app, even if I have starred words in conversation they are still not there in "Progress -> Vocabulary". Also, would be great if I could easily import cards from there to Anki decks, but I could do it myself if there was API access to it.
feedback
followed the link. tried to sign up. something about the form design is incompatible with chrome's password management since chrome didn't recognize I was signing up
managed to sign up. Confirmed. page is broken in mobile (on chrome iOS on iphone 15 pro). could not scroll dowb
tried the app. typed in my email and the clicked I forgot my password. app hated me because it made me type my email address again even though I'd just typed it. clicked submit. app crashed. Tried again. it crashed again
in any case, if it works it sounds like a great idea. I worry how well it will judge pronunciation. I'd expect it to be harsher than a human. as an example. in RockBand, the game, it judges you on how close to the original you sing. So if you try to sign in your own style, or your timing doesn't match the original bit still fits the song, it will mark you down
A human teacher can tell the difference between style , speed and flat wrong. wondering if an Ai can
Sorry for the inconvenient experience. We hope to get another chance and you'll have a much better experience in our app.
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
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:
中国 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.
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.
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Fantastic work, I was looking for something exactly like this. I do wish A1 didn't feel like getting thrown in the deep end - too often I don't know the words I need to respond and end up using the dictionary - but I get that this is supposed to replace language tutors, so A1 isn't really the focus.
We have a "guided" mode which should make things easier. You can turn it on in the settings (top right)
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.
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.
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
Thanks for your great work on this! As with a number of other folks here, I too have been playing with using LLMs for language learning. Primarily I've been using the Voice Control for ChatGPT extension with custom GPTs, learning Japanese.
One of the things I notice right away about your app is that your learning arc is moving from saying simple things to saying complex things, as opposed to aligning with increasing grammatical complexity. One of the things Duolingo does well is start with simple verbs, simple nouns, then slowly introduce language complexity over time: new particles, new tenses, new grammatical structures, etc. So the learning arc follows the complexity of the grammar, not the complexity of what I'm trying to express. I'm not sure I'm communicating that well :-) But for Japanese, as an example, there is a series of proficiency tests that do a good job of laying out a rough learning arc, which makes it easier to scaffold someone in, meet them where they are, and then start building on the knowledge they already have. When I futz with LLMs it's largely been to box the LLM in at a particular language level and then use it to practice language concepts at that level: for example, use JLPT N4 vocab and grammar and let's have a conversation about my day at university using formal language. If there was some way to roughly align the Univerbal conversation against tiers in language learning and then help me progress along that arc, it would be even more valuable.
My actual expertise is in games for learning though, and I appreciate what I saw you doing with "goals" in the "meeting a new friend" stage. Gamification is primarily about engagement, keeping me motivated, keeping me involved, keeping me coming back. Duo does a ton of gamification and uses it to good effect even though I know it does drive some people bonkers. But am I about to break my 500-day streak? No I am not. Gamification works! :) With the capabilities that you already demonstrate you could probably walk closer to making it an actual game, if you wanted to: the primary difference being that you'd need to add learning elements in there beyond the suggestions you have now (which are great, btw). Think of the way Zelda teaches you a new control mechanic through the individual shrines and bosses (formative and summative assessment, essentially), and adds the control details to your options menu once you've learned them (like having a grammar guide or vocabulary list once you've demonstrated mastery). What your game would be would be something very different from Zelda, but... it is fun to think about!
Love what you're doing!
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.
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?
Yes, something in recording was reset and it worked again.
I really like the concept - good execution. I picked up the ability to click on a word for translation easily.
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.
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!
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.
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Are you going to add the ability to share grocery lists with your spouse? I don't really need a language tutor but if it had really good grocery list sharing features I might use it.
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.
Aww, the STT seems to fail with this error in console https://snipboard.io/qm6KuB.jpg
interesting tho
It's great! I really like it. I would buy the pro subscription if it was a bit cheaper. 19.99 CAD/month seems a bit too much (at least for me).
Honestly I am more and more in support of paying a bit more for software. If it’s not worth it to you, that’s okay. However, I don’t want to push indie product devs into a low pricing tier where they feel strangulated and that further development isn’t worth their time.
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.
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"?
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?
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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.
But when it was activated it was clear that it was activated. Or was should that also be shown more clearly?
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.
Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to univerbal.app because this website requires a secure connection.
Same with Chrome...
Y'all cannot imagine how much feedback I recorded from this thread now. Our backlog just grew A LOT haha.
It’s super cool guys , congrats I’m using it a bit and I enjoyed it. Keep on going
Thanks man, I really appreciate it.
Very cool! Just a heads up your Google play button just takes me to the apple store
Thanks for the hint, We'll fix that!
i first tried spanish and then switched to english. it started mixing up languages, i.e. i got spanish text into my input field for some reason ...
Great app! Pls add Punjabi
Congrats on launching.
"Unfortunately, the Safari Browser does not work well with recording audio. Use Chrome or Firefox instead."
Yeah...sorry about that. It seems that Safari has become the new Internet Explorer