How to use AI to practice spoken English?

Language learning requires more practice.

Pain points

Some friends have learned English for a long time, but what they have learned is "dumb English", which is characterized by being unable to open their mouths when they see foreigners. There are many factors in this, but the most important thing is that there is too little practice. Language is something that requires a lot of training. If you often talk to foreigners, you can improve your language skills very quickly. I believe that friends who have studied abroad should agree with this.

In 2018, I wrote an article for my graduate students, introducing some experience in learning English, the link is here . One of the most important points is to find foreigners to practice oral English, which is helpful for both "listening" and "speaking". But it is rare to find foreigners to practice English in China. If it is paid sparring, even online, the price is often higher. The practice time is long and the cost is high; the practice time period is not obvious.

After ChatGPT became popular, I have been waiting for a language education application based on it. You think, the question and answer has been solved, and there are mature models for text-to-audio and audio-to-text, isn't it a matter of course?

A few days ago, I recommended an application to you, OpenCat, which has taken a step forward and can integrate Microsoft's TTS engine to read the text of the answer with natural speech.

But at that time you had to enter text yourself, which was still just text input, text + voice output. You want to say that this kind of communication is helpful for listening... It's okay, but not much.

So, when I saw the AI application Call Annie, I couldn't help but shine.

to experience

The app is available for download from the App Store.

After opening, there is an option to make a call. Just click.

Don't worry, it's not for you to actually make international calls. The person you "call" is this AI character - Annie.

Annie can interact directly with you by voice. In the process of pronunciation, she can adjust her expressions and movements according to the speech, making you feel as if you are talking to a real person.

During the conversation, you can record it. I recorded a video of my conversation with Annie, you can watch it first.

From this conversation alone, the communication is not very smooth. When I came up and asked her to help me check the weather, she told me that there was no internet connection function, so I couldn't check it. Then talk about experiences, hobbies and so on. You've seen that I was very rude several times and interrupted Annie's speech. In fact, I am not that impolite when talking in daily life. Where is the problem?

The first is the software settings. In order to prevent Tian'er from being "talked to death", Annie will take the initiative to ask you questions. And the questions are very detailed. Almost every answer is followed by rhetorical questions or follow-up questions. But this can cause problems, sometimes I don't want to change the subject, but want to continue the conversation along the original path, so I have to interrupt her speech.

Another problem is that Annie can't "see" us, so she can't judge from the tone, expression and action whether we are willing to speak immediately. In normal conversations, as long as we can see the other party, we will always perceive or anticipate that the other party is about to speak, so we can give the other party time to speak. Annie can't do that, and I just have to interrupt rudely sometimes. Fortunately, Annie's design is a high priority for users. Now that you're talking, she stops to listen to you and gives continued responses.

There is still a lot of room for improvement in the current form of communication. However, compared to the previous "AI voice correction" applications that had to be read according to the lines, Annie has made great progress.

anxiety

I posted this video, and many friends were overjoyed. But someone was very anxious and said:

Oral English teachers are about to lose their jobs.

I think it's too much to worry about. Through the video just now, you can see that Annie lacks real-time interactive features, and the delay is not small. With the current video, we can tell at a glance that this is AI and not real people. It actually has little perception of our facial expressions, especially emotions. These factors determine that there is still a gap between the dialogue experience and real people.

So so far, oral English teachers can still keep their hearts in their stomachs.

With such a big gap with oral English coaches, is this app meaningless to ordinary learners? of course not. When we learn a foreign language, a very important way to improve is to get feedback . When you speak to foreigners, you are often worried about whether your pronunciation and expression can be understood and understood. If AI can understand what you are saying, those native speakers will naturally have no problem.

This kind of self-confidence is really important for foreign language learning. It's just that many people go through this stage and completely forget about it.

In Call Annie, you can also specifically set her role and functions. You see, what I set here is "English Conversation" under the "Education" category.

You may also wish to try to set Annie as other roles and functions to experience the difference in dialogue content and style.

inspire

The emergence of ChatGPT has excited many people. But now some people have already felt "ChatGPT burnout". They feel that the progress of AI is too slow to be interesting. If you look at a single dimension, the cutting-edge progress speed of the big language model really cannot maintain a super-high speed all the time. But isn't that normal? Is it too greedy to expect to complete the 100-year technology tree in one year?

The key is, can developers use the technological progress that has already occurred to make amazing applications? I think Call Annie can be counted as one. Someone has made a similar dialogue robot before, and there is no technical gap, but it is mainly for fun, and it does not solve the "just needs" of large-scale crowds. Call Annie is different, at least it objectively promotes the development of AI applications for English oral practice, making interesting and useful tools quickly accessible to the public.

Are there similar needs that need to be solved urgently in the segmented fields you are familiar with? If so, I suggest you think about how to combine the ChatGPT model that is "not new now" with other technologies and professional knowledge to effectively solve the pain points.

You may think that you can't program, where can you do such a thing? actually not. In this article , I have shown you the ability of GPT-4 natural language programming. Now with the browser plug-in GPT-4, you can let AI get the latest programming API documentation, even more powerful. You can be like AI painting, just tell it your own ideas, let AI help you develop in pairs, and immediately make interesting applications. This can be said to be a rare window of opportunity for developers who do not know how to program.

Technological advances are still important. I also hope to see multi-modality used in conversational applications such as Call Annie as soon as possible, so that robots can keep track of our emotional expressions and body movements. In addition, if the interaction delay can also be shortened, we can communicate directly with a robot that understands us at any time. By that time, AI can not only become a more qualified English coach (or sparring partner), but also many daily assistant tasks can be efficiently completed by AI applications.

summary

In this article, I introduce you to Call Annie, an AI conversational robot application. Not only can she understand what you say, but she can also communicate with you with standard pronunciation. I hope you can quickly improve your speaking and listening skills by practicing with her, and communicate better with people who cannot speak Chinese.

Have you found a better app to help you practice speaking? Welcome to leave a message, let's exchange and discuss together.

Happy learning English!

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