On the last day of my visit to Japan I am alone and I drive in a hot feathers on the roof of a skyscraper, praying that nobody is adding me to me. In recent months I use Chatgpt's advanced speech mode as an AI language teacher, part of a test to assess the potential of Generative AI and both a learning tool and a traveling companion. The excessive talking with both strangers and a chatbot on my phone was enlightening and tiring. I am ready to close my Yapper for a minute and enjoy the silence.
When OpenAi launched Chatgpt at the end of 2022, it showed a fire storm of generative AI competition and public interest. More than two years later, many people still don't know for sure whether it can be useful in their daily lives outside of work.
A video from OpenAi in May 2024 those two researchers chat back and forth, one in English and the other in Spanish, where Chatgpt acts as an interpreter with a low latency, in my memory. I wondered how practically the advanced speech mode could be to learn how to speak pieces of a new language and whether it is a valuable app for travelers.
To better understand how AI -speechtools could transform the future of learning languages, I spent a month practicing Japanese with the Chatgpt -Smartphone -app before I traveled to Tokyo for the first time. Besides looking at what Anime, I had zero working knowledge of the language. During conversation sessions with the advanced speech mode that usually lasted about 30 minutes, I often approached it as my synthetic, over-the-phone-rating tutor, practice fundamental travel sentences for navigating through transport, restaurants and shops.
During an earlier journey I used Duolingo, a smartphone app with quizzes and games for learning language, to polish my Spanish. I was curious how Chatgpt would compare. I often test new AI tools to understand their benefits and limitations, and I wanted to see if this approach to language learning could be the murderous function that makes these tools more attractive to more people.
Me and my ai language tutor
Jackie Shannon, an OpenAi product leader for multimodal AI and chatgpt, claims to use the chatbot to practice Spanish vocabulary words while she drives to the office. She suggests that beginners like I start using the first to learn sentences well-informed students can immediately try freely flowing dialogues with the AI tool. “I think they should go into conversation right away,” she says. “Such as:” Help me have a conversation about the news about X. ” Or: “Help me to practice ordering dinner.” '
So I worked on useful travel sentences with chatgpt and the development of Rollenplay scenarios, such as pretending they order food and pick cows and calves in an Izakaya restaurant. Nothing was really holding during the first two weeks, and I started to get nervous, but around week three I started to get a loose grip on a few important Japanese sentences for travelers, and I felt noticeably less anxious about the approaching interactions in one other language.
Chatgpt is not necessarily designed with language acquisition in mind. “This is a tool with a number of different use cases and it is not yet optimized for language education or translation,” says Shannon. The general nature of the standard settings of the chatbot can initially lead to a frustrating dullness of interactions, but after a few interactions of memory function that was recorded fairly quickly that I intended to have a Japanese trip and a talking practice.
