Comment by 55555
1 day ago
I'm an advanced learner but I stopped after a few moments because it's boring. It's asking me questions that you'd ask a beginner (although a beginner wouldn't understand the questions). It just asked what food I like to eat, where I like to travel, whether I like the weather, etc. I have a language tutor IRL and I have found that we run out of things to talk about too. So we often find ourselves just discussing the latest events from the news. I think you should feed fresh conversation topics daily from a data source like the news, localized to the user. There are global news APIs you can subscribe to.
I'm not sure that would solve the problem. Ultimately this (and speaking with LLMs in general) feels a lot like filling in an adaptive form rather than talking to a human being. The LLM, for example, is never going to go on and tell you some anecdote from its life (and if it were prompted to do so it would come across as quite insincere). It's not going to say, "Oh that neighborhood is not safe," when you tell it about where you'll live when studying abroad. It's not going to recommend supplementary material (or worse, it will...with broken links that never existed).
I'm not even sure this helps with speaking practice since it's just a test of whether what you said can be transcribed by Whisper, which is not at all a test of correct pronunciation. I just tried it with the most horrid, butchered accent I could muster, and it still worked...if I practiced for months on end like that, I'd end up in a very difficult place as a language learner.