As is, I jumped out of the funnel already.
2. Make it available for all (major) languages.
3. Profit!
Also, integrate with captcha + rate limit to prevent abuse. Authentication alone is not strong enough deterrent to a motivated adversary.
I could see using this on a mobile/tablet app.
Also, pricing is not mentioned anywhere on the start page or before signup
I'm the target audience for this app, but I don't really want to generate my own stories; I want to read. Generating stories is just additional work for me, and I don't know how good the story is before I generate and read it. If I had access to a library of human-reviewed stories, I'd just read those, knowing that they are at least okay. You wouldn't even have to review them yourself; you could have a system for users to rate stories.
You're selling this as an AI product, but I don't care about AI. I care about learning a new language by reading stories.
Then subscribers could like/upvote Stories when they like them.
- You could look at running a locally hosted model. There are some good story writing ones, albeit unsure for languages.
- Help visitors generate example stories for language pairs on your website ... if a language pair already has one, maybe show a pre-existing one.
.. if it's a new language pair being tested, inform the user it may be shared with others to let them see how the system works?
There has to be user value to login or nobody will do it.
To calibrate the content to your reading level, rather than generating the content, it tracks your comprehension and shows you how much of a given webpage or book you already understand.
It has optional Anki integration if you don't want to use the built-in ones. I work on this full-time now and am about to launch a manga reading mode, plus Netflix caption lookups.
A couple of suggestions: - I'm learning Hebrew and I'm at the beginner stage, so it would be good to have niqqud. Even with the STT, it's helpful at this stage. - For the STT, every time I tried it, it just said something that sounded like "Dodd."
1.) a "long" story is still only like 20 sentences 2.) a real translation for each sentence is nice but often you are still left wondering what each word means. a "word by word" literal translation would be more useful either as an option or additionally. or the ability to click on any word and see the translation (bonus points for the declinations / conjugations too)
But, please focus on 3 or 4 languages. Do those well.
Asian languages ( apparently Cantonese isn’t on the list ) are very hard to machine translate.
As is this is just Chat GPT + AWS Translate + AWS Text To Speech. Along with Firebase for user management and a very nice UX front end.
To turn this into a product I’d select maybe 3 languages, French , Spanish, German and hire advisors for all 3. Work on creating a few stories edited by your advisors and add basic gamification/quizzes.
I like the idea though
So you pass in two texts and get back some form of aligned text. If you have some knowledge of the language you are trying to learn and are ok without a perfect sentence-to-sentence alignment, then this would work.
My motivation is to improve my wife's and my knowledge of each other's languages while reading books to our daughter.
For a moment I got excited that someone else had already built it :)
celltalk•3d ago
That’s when I remembered those books with one language on one page and the translation on the opposite page. Inspired by that concept, I thought, why not use AI to create something similar, but even more interactive?
So, we built DuoBook.
Here's how it works:
1) Start writing your story in your language.
2) Select the language you want to learn.
3) AI helps complete the story, side-by-side with your native language.
It’s still early days, and it might not be perfect, but it's genuinely helping us—and we hope it helps you too!
Check it out: duobook.co
WalterGR•3d ago
One term for this is "Parallel Text" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_text).
Cool idea! I've been thinking about learning German - I'll have to give this a try.
celltalk•3d ago
gus_massa•2d ago
Does it highlight the matching words?
celltalk•14h ago
And, we don’t have language alignment yet. Still, it highlights some of the “hard” words.
freddie_mercury•13h ago
celltalk•13h ago
vunderba•13h ago
celltalk•13h ago
PaulRobinson•12h ago
Go get something out of Project Gutenberg that is popular, and not too long.
Translate it into 3-4 major languages. Give those away for free.
Even better, test your translations against actual public domain translations if they exist, and be transparent about WER for each language.
If you want this to be a business, you’re going to have to do some serious business-like things.
freddie_mercury•11h ago
PaulRobinson•11h ago
Translation models are getting better all the time - it's a weird artefact of transformer architectures that got missed in the GenAI hype, that they're pretty great at translation, especially across languages with smaller training corpuses - but you should definitely know if the text you're reading is only likely to be 90% "correctly" translated.
trinix912•10h ago
Especially this. I often come across AI products that claim to do well in 100+ languages, show some really good DE/FR/SP/RU examples, then I try it with my language (Slovene) and am just disappointed. If you claim to support all those languages, please have a sample result in all of them. Even if they aren't all equally good, it comes across as more genuine than making bold claims that anyone who speaks a language with < 10 million speakers knows likely aren't true.
roel_v•11h ago
wingerlang•12h ago
celltalk•12h ago
https://imgur.com/a/nTbBgdJ
atoav•12h ago
- uses words and phrases that are either of rare historic origin or completely made up new ones
- verb forms so uncommon that verb form she used frequently (the Infliktiv) has a second inofficial name: the Erikativ
- she frequently borrowed from the biggest writers and poets in the German language in her translations
- for the younger figures there is an entirely made up youth slang that is both appealing and incredibly entertaining to read
The english originals are utterly boring to read in comparison. Her work has a literaric and entertainer quality of the kind that made generations realize there is no real border between serious high brow literature and comics.
benatkin•11h ago
Edit: Year of Linux on the Desktop is another.
Edit 2: For Year of Linux on the Desktop it did 2024 as that year. Might want to add the current date to the prompt and say that to have stuff imagined in the future be after that. Another thought is to have the LLM suggest a story prompt for you.
celltalk•11h ago
benatkin•11h ago
yurishimo•10h ago
The "long" story is not that long. I was expecting something closer to 1000 words or more. Using your Donald Duck example, I doubt the long story was more than 4 or 5 comic book pages. I started with the magic mushroom example, intermediate difficulty, and long length.
I also generated another story using the "lost puppy" prompt, but this time advanced difficulty and long. The difficulty was ramped up which I appreciate, but the length was even shorter than before!
The speech synthesis is garbage, but I'm sure you already know that. For a free service (for now), I understand why some limitations are in place, but it doesn't look good for your product unless you're targeting beginners. I'm not sure what you're offering is useful to anyone above that level. 3 stories per day for me is about 10-15 minutes on advanced (including the generation waiting time).
I wish you luck with the project! Imo, your time is best spent now optimizing your spend so you can provide higher quality audio to go alongside the text. I'm sure you will have plenty of content generated, but surfacing that to users without it feeling icky might also be a challenge.