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Comment by qgin | Hacker News Reader

I love Claude's memory implementation, but I turned memory off in ChatGPT. I use ChatGPT for too many disparate things and it was weird when it was making associations across things that aren't actually associated in my life.

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I’m the opposite. ChatGPT’s ability to automatically pull from its memory is way better than remembering to to ask.

I turned it off because it seemed to only remember previous hallucinations it'd made and bring them up again.

It's funny, I can't get ChatGPT to remember basic things at all. I'm using it to learn a language (I tried many AI tutors and just raw ChatGPT was the best by far) and I constantly have to tell it to speak slowly. I will tell it to remember this as a rule and to do this for all our conversations but it literally can't remember that. It's strange. There are other things too.

How do you use it to learn languages? I tried using it to shadow speaking, but it kept saying I was repeating it back correctly (or "mostly correctly"), even when I forgot half the sentence and was completely wrong

I use it a couple ways. I am learning Hindi and while it's the third most spoken language in the world there really isn't that many resources for learning it. Sites like Babel don't have a Hindi course. I started with Pimsleur which is by far the best resource out there. It's mix of vocab and conversation done in an incredibly effective way. They only have two levels for Hindi so it's not a lot. With that base I use ChatGPT in the following ways.

- With the new GPT Voice, I have basic, planned conversations. Let's go to a restaurant. Let's say we're friends who ran into each other. etc...

- I use it for quizzes. "Let's work on these verbs in these tenses. Come up with a quiz randomly selecting a verb and a tense and ask me to say real world sentences." "Quiz me on the numbers one through twenty".

- I am using it to help learn the Hindi script. I ask it to write childrens stories for me, but I ask it to write each line in the hindi script, then phonetic spelling of the hindi script, and then in english so I can scroll down and see only the hindi first, then if I have issues I can see the phonetic spelling of the hindi. Then I can try to translate it and then check the english translation on the third line.

Those are the main things I'm doing. I don't know if I'll ever be fluent, but I find if you work on these basic ever day conversations you can have a conversation with someone. If you speak a language for the first time around a native speaker it's usually very predictable. They'll ask how long you've been learning, where did you learn, have you been to <country>, and you can direct the conversation by saying things about where you live and your family, etc... That's the base I'm building and it's fun. If you're not doing at least 30 minutes a day you're never going to learn a language, you probably need an hour more a day to really get fluent.

Have you tried creating a separate project for language learning and adding your preferences to project instructions?

I'm using the web interface and have it in it's own conversation. I assume the app would be the same thing but maybe it will be better.

Memory is by far the best feature in ChatGPT and it is the only reason I keep using it. I want it to be personalised and I want it to use information about me when needed.

For example: I could create memories related to a project of mine and don’t have to give every new chat context about the project. This is a massive quality of life improvement.

But I am not a big fan of the conversation memory created in background that I have no control over.

Exactly. The control over when to actually retrieve historical chats is so worthwhile. With ChatGPT, there is some slop from conversations I might have no desire to ever refer to again.

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