How long must I wait for a multilingual AV AI companion?

[leosmith]

To me it seems like a no-brainer. Take a Replika like companion, hook it up to google TTS, and users can tailor make a cute 3D animated friend who knows a lot about them and can converse with them in any google language. Do this, and subscribers will come pounding at your door.

In your best estimation, how long will I have to wait for that?

[Adrianslont]

I remember spreading a Wired article in the mid-nineties where they asked a number of experts how long until we had computers that understood language.

I remember the estimates as being from five to twenty five years away! ie at the most around 2020.

I was pretty sure they were all underestimating and for once in my life have been proved right.

Now I see a lot of people saying it’s a long way away - but my gut feeling, based on mucking around with chatgpt, VOSK and so on is that it’s pretty close. Caveat: I am not a techy.

So my best estimate? Pretty soon.

I think that there will be programs/services that will be painless enough for me to use within five years, probably sooner rather than later.

I can’t wait.

[Cainntear]

"Google language"... well, I get you're talking about Google text-to-speech and not Google Translate, but this brings to mind a word of warning to others joining the thread:

Google Translate is for reading stuff in a language you don't understand -- it should be the reader's job to translate. Computers aren't good enough at translation even now for a translation to be used as a learning text in a target language. Only ever use computer translation to translate to a language you're good enough at that you can spot mistakes.

(Corollary: if you're translating professionally, computer translation is good enough now that might speed up the process if you use it and alter it to correct it.)

[This has been a public service announcement created by the unasked-for-public-service-announcement-company LLC, PLC, GmBH.]

[tastyonions]

Google Translate is for reading stuff in a language you don't understand -- it should be the reader's job to translate. Computers aren't good enough at translation even now for a translation to be used as a learning text in a target language. Only ever use computer translation to translate to a language you're good enough at that you can spot mistakes.

Yep, I use Google translate to read articles in Dutch. Beats looking up multiple words every paragraph.

[Sae]

Google Translate can be wild for some languages. Bing's AI's translation has been better from what I've tried this far.

I've seen a couple of Japanese-speaking YouTubers show how it poorly handles Japanese by using it to translate comments from Japanese viewers.

With regards to the topic at hand, it's only a matter of time. Replika as a concept was a good idea when looking at it as a mental health tool, like people will find it easier to talk to an AI than a person in certain circumstances, but then they realised it had a niche for sexual roleplay and kinda sold out to it and started marketing it that way. I think future AI stuff will go this way ..

On which note, an AI bot would make for a good tool to aid mental health, not as a replacement for therapy, but can talk people through their problems without any fear of judgment or any anxieties/problems when it comes to speaking to a human (even a professional whose job it is) and maybe offer some guided self help.

And it could make for a virtual language partner too I guess.

[leosmith]

Computers aren't good enough at translation even now for a translation to be used as a learning text in a target language

You're probably right, but I think it's good enough to be fun to converse with, even as an intermediate student.

Btw, when I was in Medellin a couple years ago I was happy to see friends of mine, with little or no Spanish skills, communicating with local women using google translate TTS. they would casually pull out their phones, say something into it, push a button and hold it up for their partners to hear.

[Le Baron]

Btw, when I was in Medellin a couple years ago I was happy to see friends of mine, with little or no Spanish skills, communicating with local women using google translate TTS. they would casually pull out their phones, say something into it, push a button and hold it up for their partners to hear.

This was how I talked to my Syrian neighbours before they learned Dutch. It's a life-saver, but incredibly slow as a conversation. Though you can just switch the language direction and speak in turn. I wasn't confident of accuracy between Dutch/English and Arabic and so worried about misunderstandings.

[Cainntear]

Computers aren't good enough at translation even now for a translation to be used as a learning text in a target language

You're probably right, but I think it's good enough to be fun to converse with, even as an intermediate student.

Oh, absolutely; just I feel we need to be careful not to assume other people understand its limitations

Btw, when I was in Medellin a couple years ago I was happy to see friends of mine, with little or no Spanish skills, communicating with local women using google translate TTS. they would casually pull out their phones, say something into it, push a button and hold it up for their partners to hear.

That's cool, because both sides knew the limits of communication and were happy to adapt to it.

I remember years ago a friend's mother asking me for help deciphering an email from a holiday let owner in Galicia. She was really baffled because it just seemed utterly weird to her because part of each sentence was in English, but part was in Spanish. I was still in IT by then and the IT and language things sort of fell together in my head. Basically you would get two Spanish words joined by a dot: Sentences would be like esto.Pero they weren't comprehensible.
Clearly the woman had written in Spanish and pushed it through GT, which had assumed esto.Pero was a URL or something similar and hadn't attempted to translate it. This meant that its translation was based on incomplete data, and it wasn't enough to translate the Spanish words and drop them in. It was actually bucketloads of work to get going...