You (lingQ) is spending money on irrelevant things, instead of your core product. I am sure people would appreciate it way more if you got the licenses for percy jackson, Narnia, lord of the rings (or language specific content such as „die drei ???“ or „die wilden kerle“ for german lingq) etc. instead of the next unwanted and expensive AI feature.
Similalrly, before adding the next niche language, expand the content of your existing ones, and fix the UI/AI-voice over bugs.
Finally, reconsider your pricing. If i want to have a naturally sounding ai voice over, I need to pay 400+ Euros. At that point i can just buy audible twice over and have access to actually interesting stories, read by a native.
In short: fix your bugs, focus on your core languages, license actual good content, and save money on expensive AI features (AI summary, AI Q&A, AI simplification etc.).
I’m ready to pay extra for such a feature (once per book, not every month!). For me, this would add IMMENSE VALUE to LingQ and replace Kindle purchases. I suspect thousands of LingQ users are ready too.
We don’t even need a large catalogue to start with: LingQ could start by offering 1 or 2 books for purchase, see how users react, and then progressively build on that.
Just a thought.
At some point, AI companies will have to stop bleeding money**1 to please their investors, and multiply the price of their services by 2, 3, 10…
Could LingQ survive such a steep raise, or would it have to discontinue the premium services?
I think your idea could work very well if there was literally just a link to various eBook stores or certain books in said stores for the language you’re learning. As an example, I’m just starting to learn Ukrainian and have no idea where to buy eBooks, and if I pick native content (not translations of books I already know), I have no idea how difficult it’s going to be. I ended up getting an AI to translate a public domain book from English to Ukrainian for free instead. But LingQ could have a section which says “You’re Beginner 1? Here are several Beginner 1 eBooks you can buy at a Ukrainian webstore then upload to our site for yourself!”.
There is no need for LingQ itself to offer the books for sale or borrow, when a link to another site would work just fine. Selling them on LingQ itself would just cause a ton of administrative and legal headaches for them, which could also drive up prices on their subscriptions. Anytime you make an in-copyright book or movie available to a large group of people you need to pay a hefty “broadcasting” fee.
I dont think that an external store is needed. LingQ already has a native store system; moreover, they could also license books and then provide them to premium subscribes for „free“.
Since it works with Harry Potter in French i dont see why it cant work with other books in other languages.
Honestly, how they inplement it is kinda irrelevant. Kindle and audible costs less than lingqs premium+ while offering so much more.
I find it unbelievable thar LingQ cant afford to buy some of the rights of certain books like they did with harry potter in french (unless they are hosting that illegally).
The entire demand for LingQ to become an „upload your own content“ platform comes from their lack of content which partly derives from how little they pay creators on LingQ.
Likely it was uploaded by someone and made public (shouldn’t be). I believe the first book was made free through open library and I think you can download it for free from amazon, or at least you could in the past.
I have no idea how easily or costly licensing books from really famous authors would be. I suspect it’s not as easy or as cheap as most people are thinking here. However, I do agree, if there’s an economical way to do it that would be great as it is a pain to try an import non free domain ebooks unless you can purchase them outside of Amazon.
Obtain the book you want in your language. If you can find it legally, great. If you can’t, then download it anyway and go buy the English kindle version on Amazon so the author gets paid. Then upload the book into LingQ.
I can read and listen to books on Kindle/Audible for cheaper. With add-ons i can also look up words on Kindle like on LingQ. What makes LingQ unique is the ability to do three things at the same time: reading, whilst listening, and looking up words you dont know.
If one uses lingq only to import books, one is essentially paying for a buggy dictionary service with a buggy ai voiceover.
Kindle lookups aren’t available for my language (Ukrainian). Also, the word count and other stats features in LingQ are very motivating. LingQ is better for me.
I agree. An important feature is the option to create audio files from text (or viceversa), and reading+listening at the same time + looking up yellow words for convenience. But a heavy user should pay more for having more audio transcribed and, as you said, Audible+Kindle becomes a much better quality.
With the Kindle app I can use the built-in dictionary from my Mac or iPhone if I want to look up words. Yes, I won’t record them in the same way I could do with LingQ, but when you become advanced, those features become less important.
I believe their integrated AI is saving LingQ at the moment. The competition is brutal though, and I can’t see it easy to manage with this current software they have.
The identity of Lingq is massive input, reading + listening, and this should be the “one thing” to do super well. It should work perfectly. Focus should go to create the best e-reader for massive input + listening. Everything else is a distraction. You cannot make everybody happy.
I have 7 AI apps in my iPhone/Mac right now + ANKI, Audible and Kindle! LingQ is still there, competing with the others, but it’s gonna be difficult!
Sentence mode is very unique too, other similar apps don’t have it from what I have seen. But it is not perfect due to bad audio syncs for imported audio.
Also, If LingQ adds ability to show images from book in sentence view that will be cool. It could be just a tiny icon at the relevant sentence that a user click to display a pop up image. Or it could be in its own sentence page.
That would be some valuable work.
I avoided using books on LingQ for two reasons:
the archaic language is not helpful if you are not at least very advanced
some books got deleted in the middle I was reading them, or they don’t have all chapters, and so on
Once you get burnt, you don’t want to burn yourself again.
LingQ should do some clean up and make its library reliable.
However, AI could definitely fix the archaic language of old books, and LingQ could do this work with all project Gutenberg books. That could become a massive and useful library! Lingq? Are you listening?
Yes. It’s amazing how shoddy the core functions are.
The audio whisper thing is completely broken, totally out of sync, pure garbage.
The listening function doesn’t let you click on words to see the meanings.
The import function is so basic. No default values for Level when importing to a course for instance.
I could go on and on.
I generally agree. But smaller language are great and are not too far from the core purpose. Getting core functionality great would be amazing.
I didn’t see any response from Lingq here.
The issue with AI-simplified public domain books as shared lessons is the current LingQ policy is that, aside from some special cases such as news, all shared lessons need to have an audio. Where are you getting this audio from? Another LingQ policy is that all audio in shared lessons should be by humans, not AI. As TTS is getting better, such as 11 Labs, maybe LingQ will change this policy, idk, but I do agree that low-quality TTS shouldn’t be shared.
I was thinking that for those books, a LingQ team member should be hired to do the work, or at least the supervision. The LingQ team itself can use the better AI audio in the market with no limitations, and verify the quality.
I personally don’t mind having a virtual audio if I don’t have any audio at all. Imho.
