Good question! Right now it does track contribute to your daily goal, but it does so for the entire conversation at the moment when you reach the end of a chat:
The total number of words spoken by Ami are counted towards your words read
The total number of words you wrote divided by 5 as number of words practiced (this factor of 5 is somewhat arbitrary, but it’s there because you are writing a lot of words without focussing as intensely on each one as you would in a typical practice session)
I think before bringing this feature out of beta, I will probably change this to contribute a small amount to the daily goal every time you submit each message.
Love the feature Steve, thanks! The list at the end of vocab to add, a checkbox to deselect all would be nice, then I can just check the few that I want.
UPDATE: Conversations are now available in all Readlang’s languages, with the exception, for technical reasons, of languages with right-to-left text (e.g. Arabic) and those which don’t use spaces to separate words (e.g. Japanese).
Tip: if the language you study doesn’t have good quality TTS (text-to-speech) in Readlang, try Microsoft Edge browser which has a good selection of voices covering a lot of languages.
This site is even better! Just tried it for the first time with Swedish. This is just what I needed. It forces me to actively recall words to communicate effectively, and the best thing is I get immediate feedback and corrections. Nice job Steve!
I see that you expanded the languages supported, that’s great! I have been doing something similar with Gemini directly, but I like this UI a lot. However, I noticed that the TTS voice used is different and much lower quality than the neural based one used in other parts of the site (at least for Slovak).
Edit: I didn’t see Steve’s earlier comment about using Edge, that does indeed use a much better TTS.
After having a few more conversations, I have another suggestion for improvement:
When it corrects what you say, you get long sections of “green”, and so the vocab list at the end isn’t really a vocab list. I’d like to add the one word in that green section I didn’t know, but not the entire phrase. Maybe there is a way to avoid linking like that? I’m not sure the best way to fix that issue.
This is fantastic, Steve! Thanks for adding it to the Readlang platform, which I’ve been using every day and have been enjoying.
I love that the chat starts and then it ends. (Other chatbots sort of leave you hanging and you don’t get that feeling that you’ve completed a conversation. I like that this one has a conclusion at each session.) I’ll be using this daily now as well. Bravo!
Looks like you need to have at least one word saved before the chat feature appears on the Dashboard or Practice page. It was immediately available in Spanish for me, which I’ve used before on ReadLang, but it wasn’t available in German until I saved a few words from a few texts.
This is really awesome! Is there anyway this could be connected to texts you’re reading? It would be very cool to read an article and have a conversation after to practice the vocab. It could then match the level of lexical difficulty of the text. If it asked you questions about the text it would also make it an extremely great study tool. I know Readlang is dedicated to language learning but honestly a lot of the new features would make this an incredibly useful study tool in your main language if you chose to market it in that way.
I’ve been dreaming of exactly this kind of interface since the beginning of the LLM trend. I think it’s a perfect use case for it.
One cool extra feature would be to be able to ask explanations about a word within the conversation itself, directly by clicking on it.
Anyway I hope this continues, it’s probably my favorite feature in Readlang.
I tried this briefly today (for French) and value it more than standard chatbots, given the corrections. It also felt more natural in terms of speech patterns for some reason. It’s an extremely valuable addition. Thanks!
