Let me know in here if there is a particular language you'd like to see for this!
Not gonna lie, the costs run in order of dollars per episode, so if you are keen on listening to this, let me know, otherwise it would be a waste of money :)
I would love this for French. How do you want to handle modifying the code for other languages on GitHub? A new separate project fork per language, or a pull request to the current one? Slightly problematic that "Italian" is in the top level project name if it's going to be configurable for other languages.
In the meanwhile, try this to train your ear and practice French with current news using easy vocabulary (they do speak very clearly, worked wonders for me when I was learning).
I'd be happy to rebrand it if there's interest. The main issue is that generating an episode is around $3 roughly (~$1 on GPT4 APU, ~$2 on text-to-speech). So doing a daily episode in multiple languages might be a bit costly.
But if there's enough interest, I might be happy to fund it to get it going for a bit and see how it ends.
I'm A1 in French and got there primarily with Duolingo, a little Pimsleur... and lots of beginner audiobooks. Also a fan of RFI's "Easy French Newspaper" daily podcast, but yeah, it would be so much more interesting to have a tech-focused version of the concept.
On that note, another suggestion: Offering a mobile-friendly readable transcript to go along with the audio. (RFI does this.) Reading along with the audio is my preferred way to "listen" to French audiobooks.
Also, presenting the transcript in a readable form is another way to gate content behind a log in and/or upsell. Of course, yeah, would rather it all be free, but your costs are real!
As a native Italian speaker I can tell you two things:
1. The translation is great. I actually never used ChatGPT for translating content and this opens a new world for me.
2. The text-to-speech is good, but less so than the translation itself. It still is completely understandable, but if you are a learner I believe it could cause some bad habits over time. For instance, at around the 30 second mark, the translation includes the word "immergervi" (immerse yourselves). The voice puts the accent on the 2nd "e", while it should be on the first one.
Anyway, great tool. And I would help to chime in for different languages (trying to improve my Spanish). Put a tip jar somewhere as others suggested :)
This is also great! Thank you. I can't offer in depth feedback on the text-to-speech as I am also learning Spanish, but definitely enjoyable and understandable! Also the technical jargon in Spanish is new to me, so I listened to at least few words I didn't hear yet!
I would potentially pay for this in Mandarin, although I'd be wary of the quality vs human-produced sources.
I often practice by reading sites like https://cn.wsj.com/, https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/trad, https://cn.nytimes.com/, or https://big5.ftchinese.com/. These are all text news sites so they help with reading comprehension and grammar but not at all with listening. I'm not aware of any similar audio sources, especially not ones that use professional-level language but slow it down so it's accessible to language learners. So you'd be in a unique niche.
I'm sure you're already familiar with the following, but could be interesting for others.
Spain (the country) has multiple official languages, one of them being the European Spanish called Castellano Spanish. This is what people refer to as "Spanish language". However there are others, like Catalonian, Galician, Basque, Valenciano etc. languages, which are also "Spanish", but not mutually intelligible with Castellano. These are completely different languages on their own, and interestingly, in the case of Basque, not even in the same family of languages.
Even sticking to Castilian, the regional accents and vocabulary choices could differ. You could pick a neutral Castilian accent from Spain, potentially alienating Latin Americans but I think this is often received OK if a little off. You could pick something that sounds like Mexico or Colombia, which are each common choices for things with an international audience. But then, say, an Argentine accent, to pick out one, would sound pretty different.
Yep I’m also a beginner but I haven’t found anything similar to this project.
In terms of learning materials I found classes that follow the CEFR system (A1, A2, B1 etc) have been more helpful than Duolingo and also this free resource https://www.languagetransfer.org/
If you want, DM me on https://twitter.com/LukasPlatinsky and I can send you a link to try a POC for a language-learning text adventure game. The main concept is to tell a story through conversations with NPC chatbots. Would be curious to hear feedback or any suggestions on how it could be graded to increase the complexity of the language over time.
Heard great things on Language Transfer and started listening to it.
I've mostly been doing Duolingo, recently some tutored classes on Preply. Trying to get to a level where I can converse with my Italian partner.
And I think GPT has tremendous potential for this. Seen a few projects exploring this besides mine. Can't wait to see where it goes. It would be a shame if we can't figure out some great ways to use the new generative AI algos for education!
Agreed! Especially how easy it would be to have a bot that is aware of your vocabulary level and slowly introduces more vocabulary the more you interact with it.
I'd really love to hear Portuguese. What else did you do to immerse yourself in the language you are learning? I have trouble to even force youtube to give me content in Portuguese.
I can try and get a Portuguese episode generated for you later today or tomorrow.
It’s really tough to find such content indeed. I’ve found Netflix shows in Italian and some Italian podcasts and music on Spotify.
One thing that also helps is to find a subreddit focused on learning the language (like r/italianlearning). When I searched the subreddit for books / movies / podcasts / youtubers, I found a lot of fun stuff. Many are not targeted for language learners though, so are a hit tough to follow. And the ones targeted to language learners are often quite generic and not that entertaining. Hence, this effort.
Thank you! I am at the stage when I know too little to really appreciate the content. I'm just happy to recognize some words and get a general vibe of what's being talked about. I'm mostly looking for pleasent voices that speak clearly about things I'm not totally uniterested about.
Because I’m learning Italian and need it slow and in simple words & sentences.
There are a bunch of podcasts that are called along the lines of News in Slow Italian, Stories in Slow Italian, etc that are targeted to the language learners. So just taking a fun twist on that :)
Can be done for any language though. And I’m sure the prompt can be tuned for different levels of difficulty.
Between Italian, German, Spanish and French I find it's the most difficult language to parse by ear. The lack of pauses between words, the omnipresent en and y, their numerous contracted forms and generally speaking as if they are being charged by the millisecond makes it for an extremely frustrating experience sometimes.
Not directly related to this, but what about a Firefox extension for LinguallyAI?
I know that the Firefox user base sadly is relatively small nowadays, but maybe you're already using only the cross-browser WebExtensions API, so it might not be _that_ much extra work.
I would love Swahili, I've been looking for a simple and short Swahili podcast that is not on religious topics and that's not easy, I could only find the Swahili news of the Japanese national radio (lol).
Oh, that's a great question! I'd be curious. GPT can do decent Mandarin from what I heard from my friends testing things for me. Haven't looked into text-to-speech yet though.
The quality of "podcast" is really really good. I spotted only one mispronounciation in the first couple minutes ("siete pronti ad immergervi...": immergervi had the stress on the wrong syllabe) but the rest was extremely good - kudos!
Thanks a lot! That's an amazing offer. What web related stuff are you most interested in? I've been playing with React a bit, but not sure if I could have a conversation in Itaian on it yet :D I'd be happy to chat on GPT and ML as well.
I’m more into the web as a whole and tech on general. But I’m just curious about everything. I’m not super knowledgeable about ML but I’m certainly interested in the impact it’s having on the world.
I'm a few minutes into it and it seems really well done, save for a few quirks, mostly pauses between words and misplaced accents.
Curiously, some English words were spoken in perfect English, while others sounded like coming from someone not aware of the pronunciation differences with respect to Italian.
Some compression artifacts can however be heard, especially when using headphones.
btw: not sure what slow means; to me the talking speed sounds quite normal.
Thanks! This was by far the best Italian voice I've found, but definitely not perfect...
The "slow" refers to the genre of podcasts like News in Slow Italian. Mostly using simple language and slow speed. I've set the speed to 85%, might need to dial it down even slower it seems :)
Wow this is a really nice idea. I also have been learning italian with Duolingo for quite a while but have hit a plateau once I finished the course.
So far I've only listened to the beginning, but that sounds like exactly the right difficulty to improve my listening comprehension.
Do you have an approach to improve speaking italian (not only understanding)? Because that is the end goal for me and something that Duolingo doesn't really teach that much.
I've started taking some tutored classes from Preply, that helps.
Watching shows on Netflix, listening to random podcasts also helps.
But bridging this Duolingo-to-fluency gap, that's exactly what I'm trying to explore at the moment with the other projects on https://hn.lingually.ai/. I think AI can give something no other approaches can.
So essentially, I've now got a Chrome extension to get immediate feedback on text I write. Then I have a POC for a text-adventure game to practice chatting with GPT-powered characters (dm me at https://twitter.com/LukasPlatinsky and I can set you up with a link to test). Now the podcast for some content to listen to. I next want to explore some daily short writing prompts with immediate grammar check by AI. Adding Whisper could unlock speaking as well.
Lots of opportunities! Let me know if you're interested in trying any of these out :)
Got an opportunity to give this a proper listen - really good. As a non-native Italian speaker, I'm impressed: and now I can have something that can accompany me to work. Thanks, great work.
And this is already the best one I've found. Trust me, you don't want to hear some of the Italian text-to-speech stuff I've come across during this search...
I'm travelling in Italy right now for the first time and am totally in love with it. It's the first country I've ever traveled to that I can see myself returning to multiple times.
Had a chance to try this - really good, with just minor odd pronunciations, but everything else is top quality and, more importantly, very enjoyable. Thanks.
Not gonna lie, the costs run in order of dollars per episode, so if you are keen on listening to this, let me know, otherwise it would be a waste of money :)
Also, add a tip jar somewhere so we can chip in!
https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/journal-en-françai...
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture
I'd be happy to rebrand it if there's interest. The main issue is that generating an episode is around $3 roughly (~$1 on GPT4 APU, ~$2 on text-to-speech). So doing a daily episode in multiple languages might be a bit costly.
But if there's enough interest, I might be happy to fund it to get it going for a bit and see how it ends.
Either way, I'd be happy to fund a few weeks of a French version right now!
Let me see if I can get a French episode generated for you today or tomorrow and if you like it, I'm happy to send some more your way :)
What is your level of French?
On that note, another suggestion: Offering a mobile-friendly readable transcript to go along with the audio. (RFI does this.) Reading along with the audio is my preferred way to "listen" to French audiobooks.
Also, presenting the transcript in a readable form is another way to gate content behind a log in and/or upsell. Of course, yeah, would rather it all be free, but your costs are real!
1. The translation is great. I actually never used ChatGPT for translating content and this opens a new world for me.
2. The text-to-speech is good, but less so than the translation itself. It still is completely understandable, but if you are a learner I believe it could cause some bad habits over time. For instance, at around the 30 second mark, the translation includes the word "immergervi" (immerse yourselves). The voice puts the accent on the 2nd "e", while it should be on the first one.
Anyway, great tool. And I would help to chime in for different languages (trying to improve my Spanish). Put a tip jar somewhere as others suggested :)
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2196522/12927853
I often practice by reading sites like https://cn.wsj.com/, https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/trad, https://cn.nytimes.com/, or https://big5.ftchinese.com/. These are all text news sites so they help with reading comprehension and grammar but not at all with listening. I'm not aware of any similar audio sources, especially not ones that use professional-level language but slow it down so it's accessible to language learners. So you'd be in a unique niche.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2196522/12927853
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2196522/12927853
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2196522/12927853
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2196522/12927853
Would love it if there was a way to connect to anki to start learning vocabulary based on the content of the episode.
Are you learning Italian as well? What have you tried so far?
It's briefly mentioned on the site as well: https://hn.lingually.ai/#two
I've mostly been doing Duolingo, recently some tutored classes on Preply. Trying to get to a level where I can converse with my Italian partner.
And I think GPT has tremendous potential for this. Seen a few projects exploring this besides mine. Can't wait to see where it goes. It would be a shame if we can't figure out some great ways to use the new generative AI algos for education!
It’s really tough to find such content indeed. I’ve found Netflix shows in Italian and some Italian podcasts and music on Spotify.
One thing that also helps is to find a subreddit focused on learning the language (like r/italianlearning). When I searched the subreddit for books / movies / podcasts / youtubers, I found a lot of fun stuff. Many are not targeted for language learners though, so are a hit tough to follow. And the ones targeted to language learners are often quite generic and not that entertaining. Hence, this effort.
https://twitter.com/LinguallyAI/status/1662570120684662784
https://www.youtube.com/@Akitando
So far I've got requests for Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Russian then.
There are a bunch of podcasts that are called along the lines of News in Slow Italian, Stories in Slow Italian, etc that are targeted to the language learners. So just taking a fun twist on that :)
Can be done for any language though. And I’m sure the prompt can be tuned for different levels of difficulty.
Would it be possible to provide an English translation of the Italian transcription? Seeing them side by side would be enormously helpful.
Between Italian, German, Spanish and French I find it's the most difficult language to parse by ear. The lack of pauses between words, the omnipresent en and y, their numerous contracted forms and generally speaking as if they are being charged by the millisecond makes it for an extremely frustrating experience sometimes.
I know that the Firefox user base sadly is relatively small nowadays, but maybe you're already using only the cross-browser WebExtensions API, so it might not be _that_ much extra work.
And yes, ChatGPT speaks Swahili well.
https://twitter.com/LinguallyAI/status/1662570120684662784
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2196522/12927853
The quality of "podcast" is really really good. I spotted only one mispronounciation in the first couple minutes ("siete pronti ad immergervi...": immergervi had the stress on the wrong syllabe) but the rest was extremely good - kudos!
btw: not sure what slow means; to me the talking speed sounds quite normal.
The "slow" refers to the genre of podcasts like News in Slow Italian. Mostly using simple language and slow speed. I've set the speed to 85%, might need to dial it down even slower it seems :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Food
So far I've only listened to the beginning, but that sounds like exactly the right difficulty to improve my listening comprehension.
Do you have an approach to improve speaking italian (not only understanding)? Because that is the end goal for me and something that Duolingo doesn't really teach that much.
Watching shows on Netflix, listening to random podcasts also helps.
But bridging this Duolingo-to-fluency gap, that's exactly what I'm trying to explore at the moment with the other projects on https://hn.lingually.ai/. I think AI can give something no other approaches can.
So essentially, I've now got a Chrome extension to get immediate feedback on text I write. Then I have a POC for a text-adventure game to practice chatting with GPT-powered characters (dm me at https://twitter.com/LukasPlatinsky and I can set you up with a link to test). Now the podcast for some content to listen to. I next want to explore some daily short writing prompts with immediate grammar check by AI. Adding Whisper could unlock speaking as well.
Lots of opportunities! Let me know if you're interested in trying any of these out :)
And today's special episode is in Portuguese! Any learners out there? https://twitter.com/LinguallyAI/status/1662570120684662784
And this is already the best one I've found. Trust me, you don't want to hear some of the Italian text-to-speech stuff I've come across during this search...
I'm travelling in Italy right now for the first time and am totally in love with it. It's the first country I've ever traveled to that I can see myself returning to multiple times.
hehehe
This said, I am still impressed.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2196522/12927853
Will try some other suggested languages tomorrow :)