I've long been thinking that it would be cool to have artificial intelligence that could teach you languages. And lately, with the emergence of large language models, my dream is slowly coming true.
I've tried several different services, and my impressions of all the previous ones were not so great. All of them work very slowly. In some places, I had to wait several minutes for the service to respond. And everywhere, they immediately ask for money without even letting you see what you're actually buying. You have to buy a pig in a poke.
The folks from Lingolette, as I understand, are still in the very early stage of development. In some places, a full-fledged beautiful UI design, like the one on their homepage, is not ready yet and there's only a design made, evidently, by a developer. But it did not bother me at all because the functionality itself is developed very well. It feels like they create the product they want to use themselves. A big plus of everything to still be in the early testing stage, is that no one asks for money for anything, unlike competitors who demand tens of dollars even for a less functional product right from the start. Here, they only ask for opinions on how to improve the product and promise that a lot of things will be free forever.
To use the main features - the chatbot, dictionary, and translations - I had to log in, of course. But with a Google account, it took me 5 seconds. The chatbot, surprisingly, works very well. And it behaves not like a general-purpose bot but specifically like a teacher. Sometimes it corrects, asks leading questions. There are, of course, some shortcomings for now, but I'm sure they are not hard to fix.
The most amusing thing was when I decided to discuss with the chatbot an article whose source had a note that all the news it provides are fake. And when I asked the bot if what was written in the article was fake, it started proving to me that what was written was pure truth. And the article itself was about a fictional conflict between states.
Personally, I found it strange that the chatbot avoids expressing its opinion most of the time, only if you explicitly ask about it, and instead prefers to ask questions. It turns out not quite like completely live communication, where two people exchange opinions, but more like an interview. In principle, it does not affect the quality of language learning because it is quite sufficient for speaking practice. But if we are talking about simulating a human teacher, then I would like to see a conversational partner not only polite but also more proactive. I asked the guys about it, and they said that there is still a lot of work to be done on the behavior of the chatbot. I'll be waiting for it to be further improved.
The wow effect was caused by how low the response time is when communicating with the chatbot. So low that it creates a feeling of real-time conversation. Of course, when you look at the screen, you read the text faster than you listen to the voiced sentences. But if you keep your hand on the spacebar (the button that activates the microphone when held down) and don't look at the screen, the process becomes more interesting and productive because at the same time, you learn to recognize speech solely by hearing.
Many things in the review are relevant precisely at the time of writing. Despite the current small problems, even at this stage of development, the product is already worthy of our attention. And if you are reading this review after some time, the product probably has already advanced far ahead. For now, I give it 4 stars, with the potential for growth.
