I once went to live for a month in Chile, at a friend's place in Santiago where only a few people spoke English. At first I could hardly follow any conversation. I had studied Spanish for a few months using Babbel, which was a good foundation but also nowhere close to really preparing me for this experience. It was difficult. I choked up, froze, constantly looked for the right words to say – it was impossible to have good conversations and form deeper connections.That’s why for the first few days, I resorted to listening and trying to figure out what people were saying. Most of the time I would only recognize a word here and there (Chilean Spanish did not make things easier either). It was a week into this trip when I noticed a change happening. It was almost like the patterns of the language revealing themselves to me. You hear the same words and expressions being used over and over again, and with context I was increasingly able to figure out what was being talked about. Fast forward three weeks, I remember sitting in a bar and having deep philosophical conversations, all in Spanish. It was an incredible experience, and it showed me first-hand what the path to fluency can look like.But of course this approach is only available to very few people. Oftentimes native speakers are not accessible, even when you are an immigrant and LIVE in the country whose language you want to learn. I’ve seen a lot of people get stuck memorizing vocabulary in Duolingo, never feeling confident enough to start speaking.LLMs made it possible to simulate conversations. My co-founder Danielle and I built our first prototype for virtual reality in early 2022 using GTP3. We went for VR because we wanted to simulate a real conversation as closely as possible. In many ways, this first version was horrible. But it did show us that it’s technically feasible, and maybe more importantly that people have fun speaking to these virtual people. We made a pivot to mobile when we realized how hard it would be for our players to practice consistently in VR.This is why we ended up with interactive 3D avatars instead of chat interfaces that dominate the space nowadays. While these avatars can make the conversation more immersive, they are also subject to the uncanny valley. I remember a piece of brutally honest feedback when I prompted a (slightly drunk) friend to try and speak with one of our characters; I will never forget how she looked at the avatar and said: “I don’t want to, he looks creepy”.Since then we’ve been iterating on the interactions with our avatars many times, improving both how they look (even tiny details in the animation matter) and how they hold conversation (if they only ask and never share, it can feel like an interrogation). This work paid off. A few days ago we had one user type in the feedback form: “I just wanted to say that Karin is the best and fun I want to talk to Karin every day but I can't.”At the end of the day it’s the quality of interaction with the AI agent that will determine if you seek that experience more often. And in our case, the more enjoyable the session, the easier it is to build up a routine and stick with it. It’s our goal to get our players into the “real loop” of language learning, same as I did back in Chile, which happens when you feel confident enough to start speaking with real people. As one of our beta testers, Alina, wrote: “Now I play a little less, but only because I've met German people, and I have too much conversations with lively people every day, ahah”.I’m excited to share LingoLooper with all of you. The game is not perfect, there is a lot we want to fix and improve; but I’m proud of what we built, and I hope it shows how much love and hard work we’ve put into the project over the last two years. I’m looking forward to your feedback, and I’m happy to answer any questions regarding product, tech-stack, pedagogy or anything else!
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