More AI integration in LingQ

I’ve been wanting to use TTS to help me read books on LingQ but the default TTS is really not very good. I’m wondering why we don’t have better TTS options within LingQ and I started looking outside at AI options that seem to do a really good job at this. Then I started thinking that I would like an AI language model that can talk to me, read through a book with me and explain to me, in my target language, things that I don’t understand fully.

These are things that LLMs are currently capable of doing to various degrees. I am looking at different options to decide where is best to go but, at this point, it gives me a really obvious question: what is the benefit of continuing to pay for LingQ premium when I could put the money towards a subscription to an AI model that can do all of these things that I just can’t get here. The only extras that I get from LingQ is the storing of all the vocabulary that I encounter, which is nice but I rarely use, and all of the tracking and stats which are also nice but not really necessary.

Is there any information on how much of this stuff is coming to LingQ and when it might arrive? Right now I’m considering whether I want to abandon my 1600+ day streak and just move on to something more advanced. I’d like to stay on the platform but it seems harder to justify now.

What issues are you having with TTS? It’s one of the functions of LingQ that I’ve had absolutely zero issues with.

In general, IMO, LingQ needs more targeted AI use, not more just for the sake of having more.

Also, keep in mind that your new best friend LLM will casually, confidently misinform you for a whole host of reasons.

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Improvements, yes. More bells and whistles that won’t work correctly and make the platform unusable for days, no.

There are already tons of things to fix on here, from the YouTube imports, to the Whisper transcription functions. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The team should focus on that before anything else.

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The issue I’m having with TTS is that it just reads each character in a long list, almost entirely ignoring punctuation or any general flow. The pronunciation is good and it’s better than nothing but I can feed my ebook into any AI tool and get a much better reader. I think that should be easily available within LingQ.

That’s interesting. I bet it’s language-specific. The Chinese TTS is quite robotic in its cadence, but there are definitely appropriate pauses.

May I ask what’s stopping you from just using an AI reader for that content?

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Nothing is stopping me. That’s kind of my point. My main interaction with LingQ is either listening to podcasts while I’m walking to work or doing other stuff - which doesn’t really require the app, or reading books. If I want to add audio to ebooks I have that don’t have audio with them then I would like to add that in LingQ. If I have to go elsewhere to get it then I’m starting to feel like I may as well use an AI tool that can import the ebook and do good TTS then get a browser extension that lets me look up words I don’t know easily as this is the main help of LingQ. If it becomes easier to just do this elsewhere then I’m basically just putting things into LingQ just for the streak and stats tracking, which is nice but not as necessary.

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I agree that the TTS could definitely use some improvement. But adding a bunch of additional AI-slop features that gum up the works is a terrible idea, especially now when LingQ seems to be in a good place.

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Yeah, the main thing is the TTS. I’m finding myself using other websites to generate audio, then trying to sync them up with LingQ lessons which splits up chapters of books because they’re too long for one lesson, so I have to stitch everything together manually. Seems like there must be a better way but I can’t find it. Would be so helpful if I could just have good AI generated audio options from within LingQ.