Observation #1: ChatGPT for Android got a very good speech-to-text and text-to-speech engine based on Whisper, since fall 2023. It understands what yo

Learning French with ChatGPT

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2024-03-30 12:00:10

Observation #1: ChatGPT for Android got a very good speech-to-text and text-to-speech engine based on Whisper, since fall 2023. It understands what you say well and intones its phrases nicely when it speaks. You can have real conversations with it on any topic. Of course, it's still far from being a human tutor in terms of analyzing your pronunciation, because what essentially reaches ChatGPT cloud is not the audio stream of your words, but just recognized text (with some glitches if you consider the sloppy pronunciation of an average beginner).

The conversion from speech to text happens on the local device. (By the way, I see great potential here for neural networks that analyze the audio stream itself and compare it to reference pronunciation - check out https://getfluently.app from fellow founder Yuri Rebryk, a cool idea, but so far implemented only for English language, as far as I know.)

Observation #2: ChatGPT allows you to extend your vocabulary in different industries and niches. Sure, it loses to a human tutor in not "hearing" your pronunciation, but it infinitely wins in the depth and breadth of its knowledge. Today it can give you 50 words from Harry Potter, and tomorrow it can act out a dialogue where you go to a restaurant and discuss the nuances of pairing white wine with oysters with the french chef. Or an angry landlord shows up because you haven't paid rent for 3 months. The possibilities are endless.