Ask HN: Is there any software capable of testing your spoken English? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there any software capable of testing your spoken English?

14 pointsthrowawaynay5 comments

I'm a beginner in AI/ML and I've been wondering for a while if it's possible to create software that would test your English level automatically.

For example a callbot that would have a conversation with you, and determine if what you say make sense and if your accent isn't horrendous.

Do you think state of the art AI could be able to solve this problem? or is it way too early for that?

Have you heard of anyone attempting this?

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When I used to be in middle school decades ago, I discovered what wonderful tool an English dictionary is. My first dictionary was an Oxford English Dictionary that I inherited from my father, originally published in the 1960s. It had the words, some funny looking alphabet which I later understood was the Phonetic Alphabet, various meanings, synonyms, antonyms and examples of use in sentences.

For someone who is intending to build a pronunciation checker, I would start with the words and their International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) equivalent. With today's text-to-speech technology and machine learning algorithms, going from voice to IPA and vice versa should be quick.

Once you have that for words, you could build on it to add evaluation of vocabulary, grammar, sentences etc., A lot of it is around assembling the data and collating training data sets, imo.

Cool project!

I'm only aware of ELSA [1], which claims to give feedback on pronunciation, intonation, vocab and grammar (and possibly more). My wife has several friends who are non-native speakers and use it primarily for pronunciation, and they have reported good results.

As a native english speaker, I don't have a use for it but I would love to see something similar in other languages.

[1] https://elsaspeak.com/en/

Google translate I've used myself to test my pronunciation when learning a language. Seems to be a good test. Native speakers pass and poor pronunciation fails.

In a way, yes. Bold Voice teaches you how to pronounce and tests you. I assume they use some ML models for tests. Check em out they’re great!

An interesting app would pick up you cursing at the computer and give you a rating that way :)

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