Google Takes Aim At Duolingo With New English Tutoring Tool (techcrunch.com) 21
Is Google laying the groundwork for a true challenger to language learning apps like Duolingo, Memrise and Babbel? In a blog post on Thursday, the search giant announced that it's rolling out a new Google Search feature designed to help people improve their English speaking skills. TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers reports: Rolling out over the next few days for Search on Android devices in Argentina, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Venezuela, with more countries and languages to come in the future, the new feature will provide interactive speaking practice for language learners translating to or from English, Google writes in a blog post. "Google Search is already a valuable tool for language learners, providing translations, definitions, and other resources to improve vocabulary," reads the the post, attributed to Google Research director Christian Plagemann and product manager Katya Cox. "Now, learners translating to or from English on their Android phones will find a new English speaking practice experience with personalized feedback."
The new experience presents Search users with prompts and asks them to speak the answers using a provided vocabulary word. During each practice session, which last 3 to 5 minutes, Search gives personalized feedback -- and the option to sign up for daily reminders to keep practicing and advance to the next stage of difficulty. How personalized is it, exactly? Well, according to Google, the experience gives semantic feedback -- indicating whether a response was relevant to a given question and comprehensible to a theoretical conversation partner. It also recommends areas where grammar could be improved, and, to give concrete suggestions for alternative ways to respond, provides a set of example answers at varying levels of language complexity. During practice sessions, learners can tap on any word they don't understand to see a translation of that word that considers the word in context.
"Designed to be used alongside other learning services and resources, like personal tutoring, mobile apps and classes, the new speaking practice feature on Google Search is another tool to assist learners on their journey," Plagemann and Cox write. [...] "We look forward to expanding to more countries and languages in the future, and to start offering partner practice content soon," Plagemann and Cox continued. "With these latest updates, which will roll out over the next few days, Google Search has become even more helpful."
The new experience presents Search users with prompts and asks them to speak the answers using a provided vocabulary word. During each practice session, which last 3 to 5 minutes, Search gives personalized feedback -- and the option to sign up for daily reminders to keep practicing and advance to the next stage of difficulty. How personalized is it, exactly? Well, according to Google, the experience gives semantic feedback -- indicating whether a response was relevant to a given question and comprehensible to a theoretical conversation partner. It also recommends areas where grammar could be improved, and, to give concrete suggestions for alternative ways to respond, provides a set of example answers at varying levels of language complexity. During practice sessions, learners can tap on any word they don't understand to see a translation of that word that considers the word in context.
"Designed to be used alongside other learning services and resources, like personal tutoring, mobile apps and classes, the new speaking practice feature on Google Search is another tool to assist learners on their journey," Plagemann and Cox write. [...] "We look forward to expanding to more countries and languages in the future, and to start offering partner practice content soon," Plagemann and Cox continued. "With these latest updates, which will roll out over the next few days, Google Search has become even more helpful."
And 18 months later canceled it (Score:3)
Just like everything else they make in-house.
If they want to get into this vertical they should do what they always do when they succeed, buy the market leader and pour money into it.
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Money is no longer free, so this is a losing strategy now.
my hovercraft is full of eels (Score:2)
I will not buy this record, it is scratched
Interesting (Score:2)
It sounds like it'd be a big improvement on the vast majority of language learning apps, which don't exactly set the bar very high & typically use methods that are antiquated & ineffective, e.g. DuoLingo is essentially the ages-old "grammar-translation" method (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]), which isn't even a method.
I've tested out ChatGPT as an resource for aiding language l
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As I walk around shopping these days, I'm hearing English spoken less and less.
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Or you could try learning a different language instead of being a xenophobic fuck.
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It's not being xenophobic to be an American citizen and expect English to be the spoken language here.
Any other attitude is an extremely recent thing...and hell, to PASS the US Citizenship tests to become a citizen you have to show a proficiency in English.
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Why should they? English is not the official language of the US.
Why are you offended of outsiders speaking their language in a land that wasn't theirs?
At least they're not killing all of you and forcing their religion and language like your ancestors did.
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It's a mistake that we didn't encode this as law long ago....other countries have it by law what the national language is.
But that aside, if you want to become a US citizen, part of that is showing a proficiency in English...that is by law.
Oh seriously? Fuck off.
Re: Interesting (Score:2)
What do you mean? People speaking their languages with friends and family, salespeople with accents, grammatical mistakes, or it's just people who arrived recently and are still learning?
It's ironic (Score:2)
that the link is to a site that doesn't check users language settings/preferences on their browser with no option to choose English. I noticed, when travelling, the user requires these services to know what they are agreeing to when entering the TechCrunch site.
This ties into another article a few days ago about how Google controls the search market. If Google does a better job than Duolingo or the other apps in meeting the users needs then why not?
It's hard to design a good language app (Score:2)
It can't be done by throwing AI at a language, and having it spit out a bunch of random phrases to memorize. It takes careful tuning and an awareness of the learner's progression and what kind of training is appropriate at any given point. Even Duolingo has struggled with this. Their biggest success was in the beginning, when they offered advancing skill levels, while allowing the user to pick and choose. But when they switched to a rigid "guided" approach, where you have to complete each lesson before goin
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I've tried Babbel and Duolingo. Between those two, Duolingo is much better, IMO.
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The point is, Duolingo is a company with a 6+ billion market cap, they are dedicated solely to language learning, and they still struggle to produce a quality app that users want to use.
I feel like the first part of that sentence explains the second.
IMHO Duolingo DID make a language app that I wanted to use and then through successive "upgrades" that seemed to do little other than ruin it for the purposes of coercing premium subscriptions they eventually took it to a level where even paying them wasn't going to make it any better.
No thanks. (Score:2)
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