"The only areas where AI delivers the goods are spamming, scamming & shamming."
I don't know why such hyperbolic statements are being made. I still find chatGPT useful for example when I want to find something that I can only vaguely describe (TV show from my childhood) or when I need simple help (write function in excel).
Also I don't like AI and LLMs are used synonymously. AI is useful in medicine, agriculture, chemistry...
I personally like that it's using speech recognition.
First, chatting and speaking are not nearly using the same skills, training for one does not necessarily train the other and you can end up having a hard time to find the words you want on the spot.
Secondly, speech recognition while not perfect, does help to make you understood by a native speaker. Speech recognition is usually working best on what's considered some of the most neutral accents in the target language, which is as a foreign speaker, exactly what you want. Seeing the recognition failed is a clue that you might need to train again to speak those words.
> TTS can't model speech accurately (it lacks emotions etc.)
I do agree on this last part though and usually TTS lacks support for other accents.
I agree that chatting and speaking requires different skill set. However I would argue that it is even more of an argument to not use speech recognition here (or at least not to force it), because chatGPT is chatting and learner is speaking. Transcription will always lose some information (for example your tone can indicate sarcasm, but chatGPT can't detect it).
To the second point: whisper can be helpful, but how can you know if it fails because of you and not the software's error? I spoke in my native language with traditional accent and it still made mistakes, also it hallucinates. Additionally being understood by whisper doesn't mean, native will understand you.
I do agree that the text generated by ChatGPT isn't really "natural" but more verbose and text oriented, some things that a native speaker would not necessarily say and won't understand speech nuances. It's clearly not perfect, I'm really not claiming that it is.
It's a good tool that I'm going to use a few times per day though, there's no really substitutes to speaking to get better at it. I'm also using other methods and tools and this would be a minor addition to my learning schedule.
> I spoke in my native language with traditional accent and it still made mistakes, also it hallucinates.
I'm also in this scenario actually because I'm a native French speaker and I cannot make myself understood by Google or Siri at all because my accent is way too strong and far outside the training voices that they used.
It's kind of a paradox but it's less a problem for non native speakers in my opinion who are trying to pick the most common accents they can in order to be broadly understood.
That's understandable,these tools definitely can be helpful, but learners should know their limitations and problems.
Also I just think speaking to the actual native speaker is still much better practice, especially given tts quality. It even pronounces words incorrectly in Japanese (wrong pitch accent).
Oh yeah sure, there's no doubt about that, it's just that these ChatGPT tools have two massive qualities compared to native speakers, they are available at any time and timezone, day or night (even for just 2 minutes) and they never get bored, you can ask the most mundane questions over and over again to practice.
I don't understand, how is that different from just using chatgpt?
Generally I don't think it is good idea to use LLMs for learning languages, especially if it wasn't trained primarily on that language.
Also if you are beginner, how can you know if what it says is even correct?
From my experience, it makes a lot of mistakes (at least in Japanese and Polish).
I'm wondering the same thing about a lot of these GPT powered products. I really would like to see more products leverage the technology, but they need to truly differentiate themselves from just throwing in a halfway clever prompt into the chat tool.
Where I could see this differentiation occur is where you add some data permanence and data organization around what has been chatted about. For example, could the tutor create a quiz for you that is not in chat, format or you can actually click on little bubbles to choose from a multiple-choice question and have a grade you at the end with some nice formatting and visual detail? Maybe it gives you a chart of how you're progressing over time...that sort of thing.
Maybe it has a separate area where it is keeping homework assignments for you or just making a course outline that you can follow along and monitor your progress day by day.
I could see myself using this if it had a composition feature where I could do some free form writing and it could make edits in place as another example. All of this could be GPT powered.
At the end of the day, the fact that you can chat with it shouldn't be the breakthrough feature because nowadays, this is a "just expected"
I watched the video, but I don't think this is practical. You can't realistically learn Japanese with gpt 3.5 as it makes ton of mistakes, gpt 4 is better, but still wouldn't use it. Even in this video it doesn't explain meaning of word 動産, but instead only breaks it down to kanji. Also you made mistake in your answer, you don't say おほしい and gpt didn't even correct it.
I've rewrote the "grammar prompt" for the helper tool on the right since the video and it does behave much better now. Although, as you say, you're limited by what 3.5 can do.
It's supposed to be a "japan simulator" so to speak, and in real life, people make effort to understand you, you can use gestures also, even write stuff on paper if necessary.
However I'm currently adding a "validate your answer" button where he should tell you if it's grammatically correct etc. and allow you to take it back.
Ultimately, it's not going to be perfect, especially not with 3.5, but at my level of Japanese I think it's more about forcing me to be creative when I speak, in scenarios that matter to me. Not just following a script from Genki, but needing to explain stuff specific to my situation etc.
It has nothing to do with Hwang. Hwang's paper was published in Science and he was called pride of Korea. In superconductor case we see infighting and even Koreans are very sceptical. If anything people who hyped this paper were mostly randoms on twitter.
Pascal and Logo Turtle are programming languages I learned at school, but never used them outside of it. I hated them back then. I don't know if this was teacher or language fault, but these IT lessons couldn't be more boring and confusing.
“If you watch all [the trailers], you know everything that’s going to happen in that movie. So how do moviegoers feel about that? There must be people, who, after watching all the trailers, don’t want to actually go see the movie.”
That's how I feel, I like watching trailers, but then I don't feel the need to actually watch a movie. Back when I had more free time I would watch 50 random trailers instead of going to cinema...
As Roger Ebert put it, "It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it."
A good movie will entertain even when you know the plot. Certainly nobody goes to see Shakespeare for the "twists".
Some movies spoil themselves by putting all of the good things in the trailer. The problem isn't with the trailer, but with the fact that they only had two minutes worth of movie to make, and should only have made a two-minute-long movie.
Miyazaki films are worth watching many times, for their beauty alone. The stories, too, reward re-watching because they are a journey you get to take with characters you connect to.
I wouldn't presume to doubt their marketing acumen. I assume they know what they're doing. But if they believe that I would see a trailer and not want to see more, then they seem to think less of this movie than I have come to expect from Miyazaki.
There is something magical about going in to a movie knowing nothing about it (beyond the studio).
That is something that watching trailers robs you of. Even for fantastic movies, that’s something you’ll never get to experience no matter how many times it’s watched.
The really good movies are immune to spoilers and you can watch them many times.
But there are also plenty of ok movies that are fun, but mot rewatchable. I usually enjoy a movie more if I watch it without knowing much and getting surprised.
In addition, I'd argue that most of those really good movies are still more enjoyable to watch without spoilers. They may be good on a re-watch, but not as good.
I think there are only a handful of exceptions. Ironically, the first exception that comes to my mind is Miyazaki's own My Neighbor Totoro.
I get his point, but it may be too late for it as some applications even have backends in js..
However I agree that it is somewhat problematic that instead of creating new languages, we create frameworks (sometimes frameworks based on other frameworks like nextjs).
Especially considering how messy js can be.
> accessible enough for non-programmers and advanced users
I mean unless you also discredit Windows and MacOS as being accessible because there exist pro applications that aren't present on those platforms, Im not sure what your point is.
I don't know why such hyperbolic statements are being made. I still find chatGPT useful for example when I want to find something that I can only vaguely describe (TV show from my childhood) or when I need simple help (write function in excel).
Also I don't like AI and LLMs are used synonymously. AI is useful in medicine, agriculture, chemistry...