An old friend is ashamed of speaking English with people but want to practice. Any pro/cons of using an educational chatbot for this?

At first I find this a pretty good use case for language models.

@buherator Once upon a time I used https://tandem.net/ to help overcome being ashamed of speaking English with people. Maybe not right now, but it could become useful for them as they progress.

@buherator I understand it’s not for everyone and in no way I’m promoting its consumption, but alcohol helped me

@buherator

It’s a good use case; the problem lies more in the ethical issues behind current LLMs.

Some cons (non-exhaustive list):
- Chatbots give incorrect answers; I’m not sure to what extent in language learning. Your friend might learn the wrong things.
- Depending on the language pair, the chances of learning incorrect information increase. For example, DeepL, the online translator, is very good for some language pairs, such as German–English, French–German, etc. But it isn’t as good with lesser-known languages. So the model needs to be trained and perform well in the languages your friends speak and want to learn.
- Accent. How does the chatbot handle accents? Will it judge your accent, will it understand your accent if it was trained on other accents? An app such as Elsa Speak takes different English accents into account, for example.

I prefer companies that specialise in learning, teaching and translation and offer specialised chatbots, rather than using generic ones such as ChatGPT, etc. And once your friend has gained a bit more confidence, I’d also recommend the Tandem app, which danzin suggested above, so that they can practise the language with real people.