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.
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 :)