Hi everyone! I’d like to introduce a new feature: Conversations.
This is currently in beta mode, and only available to premium subscribers with English as a first language who are learning one of: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch. If the feature is available to you, you’ll find a “Conversation Practice” link at the top of the Practice tab:
This is a slight departure for Readlang which is mainly built around reading practice. But I’ve long felt the need for a way to practice writing and expressing my own thoughts in Spanish.
The idea is to have casual written conversations with a virtual friend in the language you’re learning. There are some cool aspects to Readlang’s implementation of this which make it nicer than just using ChatGPT for the same thing:
On submitting each message, you’ll see visual markup correcting your writing
If you don’t know how to say something in Spanish (or whatever language you’re learning) you can just type it in English and it will get corrected to Spanish. This way you never need to feel blocked due to your language skills
All these corrections can be saved and drilled using Readlang’s typical practice sessions
If you use vocab previously saved to your account in your writing, the spaced-repetition-algorithm will update it as if you remembered it successfully within a practice session (in this case you’ll see a “Boosted vocab” note at the bottom of your message)
Here’s how it looks, showing the end of a conversation with some corrections to your own text:
Please give it a try and I’d love to hear your feedback below.
As a beta feature, there are a few rough edges:
Possible unexpected bugs - please let me know if you find any!
If you click to translate one of the bot’s words, then click again to remove the translation, it will remain in your account, even if you have “Delete Flashcard”
TTS voice is the one used by Read Aloud and set via the Reader page options. No way to set it via the Conversations Page (yet)
(I realize that there are a lot of suggestions for improvements with the rest of Readlang. I plan to devote some time to improving the core features again very soon.)
What a great idea - I have just had an initial (very quick) try and first impressions are good.
I wonder could be there a way to tell it what kind of level you would like to work at?
Great work Steve. Just tried it out for Italian and I liked it. Would be great to incorporate it for English as well. Maybe have like a monolingual option that helps make your writing better and more precise.
Sometimes, on the left side there is a value of null, I assume it is something to do with the way you are parsing data or ChatGPT losing context, it also happened with “hiking. Last”. So, probably not something to do with the lenght of the words, and it also appeared in different message instances. The language I tried it with is German.
Other than that, looks cool, and a cool idea. It is really nice that you are listening to your community and developing new stuff. Keep up the good work.
I will be sure to update the thread if I stumble across more bugs or suggestions.
I have tried it for a few minutes. I was wondering if there was a way to set it to a certain language level.Or does the chatbot gauge you level the more you interact with it?
This was an interesting case: although my response was technically correct, it looks like it might push for more diversity in vocab? I like this – it would be 10/10 if rather than appearing as an error, there was a style indicating “an even better alternative”.
Happened something similar with me. I was not referring to a word as “it” or “that” the second time but wrote the word again (ie, used the word team twice) which is redundant but grammatically correct. Such things could have a different highlight as these are suggestions for a more concise content.
Otherwise I had great time with the tool. Very straight forward. I could talk to it through my phone’s voice recognition, which was nice. Extra added features are convenient, eg adding words to vocab.
Thanks for the feedback! I think it’s being a little too eager to correct things at the moment, I’ll work on tuning this since I really intended for it only to correct things that need correcting.
If you do disagree with a correction, please click on it and then you can choose to undo or dispute it like this:
I tried the conversational chatbot briefly and have been really impressed. I think this is a welcomed important addition to the Readlang toolbox. It really forces an active and immediate effort to search for one’s own inner inventory of diction, grammar, syntax and so forth. The correction feature is great. Thanks for treating Premium users to to new feature and good luck in marshalling it through the beta stage!
Is this function only available to premium plus subscribers? I am a premium subscriber (though not plus) and I meet the other criteria, but I do not see it on my practice tab. Thank you for all your work, this feature sounds great!
It should be available to both Premium and Premium Plus subscribers right now*. Can you try to refresh your browser tab just in case you have one that’s been open since before the update? If it still doesn’t work for you please let me know!
* It’s likely that Premium users will have some restriction when this goes out of beta, perhaps one chat per day, but I haven’t decided yet.
Yes .. great new idea .. but it does seem excessive in some cases of correction … “espero que mañana se haya sol” for “espero que mañana se haga sol” or…
I just tried it yesterday and completed my chat today. This is wonderful! Especially it is wonderful that it offered to “save” its suggested corrections as things for me to practice. I just checked the “recently added” list…and there they are! As much as I previously railed against practicing in “spell the word” mode (in favor of something which turned out to be Blitz practice), in this case the extra detail is both useful to me and, actually, very much appreciated. Most of what tripped me up when confronted with the chatbot were the little details os grammar and spelling – not knowing the word or phrases I wanted to use.
Blitz and extra reading and podcast listening/practice really did a great job of vastly expanding my useful vocabulary of words in context. It is almost like you read my mind, or were looking over my shoulder at what I needed right about now! I’ve been radically decreasing my reading and vocabulary / phrase expansion in favor of details I now need to practice speakiung. And a lot of the grammar details, especially use fo “glue words” and tense shifting (en, para, por, de, de que, que, quien, he ido, etc.) I’ve largely been deferring (and, imo, rightfully so). But, now, they are the critical weakness in my ability to string together full sentences.
So, I think your chatbot implementation is just what I needed, pretty nearly exactly when I needed it! I’ll give you more feedback as I spend more time with this tool.
BTW, I imagine you are going to include chatbot time in the mix of meeting the daily practice tracking? How are you going to do that – and when? I noticed I didn’t get any credit for the time I spent with the chatbot at the expense of reading and Blitz review.
