A few days back I discovered Quazel where you could have open-ended conversations with an AI. It seemed similar to what’s going on with the ChatGPT craze I have heard so much about on TV, but focusing more on language learning.
That got me thinking: How will AI change language learning? Will there still be a need for human tutors? How can I best incorporate these new tools into my language learning?
Curious about what you think and what tips and tricks you might have already developed.
Honestly, I’m not sure there was ever really a need for human tutors, but yeah, they must be afraid for their jobs now, just as many other people will be. Once programs like ChatGPT fully incorporate text-to-speech, and especially as that technology becomes more and more advanced, it’ll basically end any “need” to hire a tutor. That said, I still imagine we’ll have to pay in some way, as it grows in popularity.
ChatGPT is turning out to be a very useful tool. I incorporate it to create stories that involve specific grammar concepts I have a problem with. For example, I tell it to write a story in the present tense, then the past tense, and then the perfect tense in German. The same story. This way I get to read a lot of repetition of the same words and to see how the same ideas are expressed in different tenses. Then I import them into LingQ for reading.
Also, I can create fill-in-the-blank type drilling exercises involving certain grammar concepts.
However, I am not sure if the text-to-speech can emulate 100% the intonation of that of a native speaker. For example, there is an option for creating text-to-speech audio within a lesson here on LingQ. Man, it seems way off the mark from the real German I get to hear from native Germans here in Germany.
In my humble opinion, there is always a need of talking with real native tutors to hear the real intonation of the language. Nonetheless, their frequency of help might be less in the near future with AI tools.
So, I think this is perfect to go here. I remember I got an email a couple weeks ago about this and I found the YT video with Steve talking about ChatGPT, AI and language learning.
It’s a great video, I’d recommend to check it out.
I’ve tried ChatGPT with its new voice features. It definitely has potential for language learners, but I’m finding the voice version of it very clunky at the moment. I tried using it to learn German, but I found it constantly wanted to switch to an American accent while it was speaking German (with the very obvious mispronunciations that go along with that). I’m not sure if I was using the app wrongly, but I was never able to get it configured to speak with me in a proper accent. And I’m pretty good when it comes to getting software to work, so I think it needs some work.
But as I said, there’s huge potential there, and for text-only, it works nicely. I just can’t get the voice feature to work at the moment.