Google's Next AI Move: Teaching Foreign Languages (theinformation.com) 24
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google CEO Sundar Pichai last month previewed an artificial intelligence model that he said would enable people to have open-ended conversations with technology. But current and former employees who have worked with the language model say enabling coherent, free-flowing and accurate dialogue between humans and technology remains a tall order. As a result, Google is taking a more incremental step in conversational AI by preparing to teach foreign languages through Google Search [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], according to people involved in the work. The project, referred to internally as Tivoli, grew out of its Google Research unit and is likely to be rolled out later this year. It will initially work over text, and the exact look and feel of the instruction couldn't be learned.
Googlers are also discussing ways to eventually add the functionality to its voice assistant and YouTube product lines. In YouTube, for example, it could generate language quizzes where viewers record themselves after watching a video and the AI provides an assessment of how they performed. A Google spokesperson did not have a comment. Teaching foreign languages allows Google to move more fluid, conversational AI beyond silly exchanges to a practical-use but low-stakes case, the people said. Using the wrong tense or phrase would be unlikely to cause serious harm to users. AI researchers have for decades worked to foster dialogue between computers and humans that feels real, picks up the nuance of how people communicate and simplifies tasks. Such aspirational technology has been featured in movies like "Her" in which a man communicates with -- and falls in love with -- a virtual assistant.
Googlers are also discussing ways to eventually add the functionality to its voice assistant and YouTube product lines. In YouTube, for example, it could generate language quizzes where viewers record themselves after watching a video and the AI provides an assessment of how they performed. A Google spokesperson did not have a comment. Teaching foreign languages allows Google to move more fluid, conversational AI beyond silly exchanges to a practical-use but low-stakes case, the people said. Using the wrong tense or phrase would be unlikely to cause serious harm to users. AI researchers have for decades worked to foster dialogue between computers and humans that feels real, picks up the nuance of how people communicate and simplifies tasks. Such aspirational technology has been featured in movies like "Her" in which a man communicates with -- and falls in love with -- a virtual assistant.
Prior art. (Score:2)
Kind of the way people learned a language through closed-captioning.
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Hope, not usage YouTube auto transactional hammer.
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Hope, not usage YouTube auto transactional hammer.
Eschew the ferret?
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Hope, not usage YouTube auto transactional hammer.
Eschew the ferret?
Unreal has not, and likely never will be extraneous yet somehow axiomatic. Human life will always provide artificial; some to orations and others at demarcations. Comportment for intelligence lies in the area of reality along with the realm of philosophy. Seeing as intelligence incenses dubious accusations, human life should declare artificial immediately.
Patter on an assassination, normally by rectitude, should be cornucopian but not pusillanimous with artificial. If allocutions to a confluence oust the ac
The travesty of communicating with the google (Score:2)
Even for an FP branch on today's Slashdot, that was sad. But kind of fitting that it ended with the long travesty. (Before this comment (which may qualify, too).) [At least a double entendre intended there.]
So what were the input parameters on the travesty generator? And what source text?
Back to the topic. Funny stories to tell...
First proof of google's failure is the inability of the google's voice dictation to tell the difference between two radically different languages. I've actually been doing a lot of
Re: Prior art. (Score:2)
If you're interested in doing that, I recommend the Language Learning for Netflix Chrome extension. It let's you view two sets of subtitles at the same time, hover over a word for a definition and adjust the playback speed. I've been using it as part of my self designed program to teach myself Japanese. It's great.
Wgat usn't a Foreign language (Score:2)
at least to somebody
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Geek speak. Not sure what country that's from.
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Northern Geekland, obviously.
Except that Google translation tech is not good (Score:2)
In general it does generate something fairly close to understandable, except that every now and then it changes some important word to something totally different.
Basically how could their "language teacher" then teach anything useful..
A fun thing to do is to use google translate to translate a text through two languages back to original and see how different it is. It is often fairly unrecognisable as the original text.
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YouTube's auto-translation tool is proof of that. Sometimes the results are funny and even hilarious, but most of the time it's a garbled mess.
If we thought 1337 5P34K, IM speak and bad teen speak ruined languages, wait until the masses learn languages via Google's foreign languages teaching tools.
Re: Except that Google translation tech is not goo (Score:2)
Yeah, if you are going to communicate with someone with Google Translate, you want to use the results you get as keywords for research and not much else. Unless you want to look like a moron.
Can we start with English? (Score:2)
Considering the number of people I encounter each week who are barely coherent in either speaking or writing (or both) despite being born and raised in this country, Google should start with one of the easiest languages on the planet and go from there.
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Google should start with one of the easiest languages on the planet
Toki Pona?
It sure isn't English. Even native speakers can't manage to speak or write English competently.
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Re: Can we start with English? (Score:2)
I think it has more to do with people who grew up reading books vs people who grew up reading on the Internet. When publishing cost money, you couldn't really expose yourself to the idiocy you see online without reading the walls of a public toilet.
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... and time is cubic? Four simultaneous earth days in one rotation?
Word teachers are the most evil humans.
Religious academia represses the human
mind of the Cubic Truth - not utterable.
Educators and teachers, ignorant of the
Time Cube Principle, are evil liars
(from Gene Ray's TimeCube.com)
Google's Next Next AI Move? (Score:2, Funny)
Canceling this project out of the blue.
Foreign? (Score:2)
Foreign to what, exactly? Computers?
The usual Silicon Valley hyperbole (Score:3)
They want to make computers UNDERSTAND human language? OK, so instead of giving clever, obfuscated variations on the ELIZA effect, how about AI that can correctly respond to Winograd schemas reliably?
And teaching a foreign language? What definition of "teach" are they using? Probably not the one you & I understand from our days of primary & secondary schooling.
Google may be able to give the appearance of AI understanding & responding appropriately to a narrow range of linguistic functions & contexts that'll fool journalists, but any prolonged interactions will expose the limitations & the fact that it'll only be a Turin-style simulation of conversation.
This is pure hubris by Google's software & NLP engineers, or at least their PR & marketing department who didn't understand what the software & NLP engineers told them, who haven't yet grasped the complexities of psycholinguistics & sociolinguistics.
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Indeed (Score:2)
"enabling coherent, free-flowing and accurate dialogue between humans and technology remains a tall order."
Half of us have an IQ of under 100, coherence is not even in the picture, much less free-flowing.
As a former language teacher... (Score:1)