AI Tutors & Language Learning
Recently I had the chance to spend a week in Spain. It was great, except for one thing – I suck at Spanish! I used to be great, and I’d say near fluent… but after 10+ years of not using that muscle, it’s atrophied like crazy. And not for a lack of trying. I’ve gone for months diligently doing Duolingo lessons (shoutout to all the Duolingo users that have an active streak going!). I’ve had my iPhone set to Spanish language for almost a year (I seem to have memorized the positions of the menus/icons without really reading them…). I even watched every episode of the Spanish soap opera “Alta Mar” on Netflix (to Ted Sarandos or whomever from Netflix can be blamed for cancelling the show – I speak your name).
In short, I’m a huge nerd... But because none of that worked as well as I’d hoped, I’ve been thinking about new strategies to reverse the atrophy and build back some muscle. Just like many edtech companies or education-adjacent startups out there – I think I should turn to AI.
AI For Language Learning
Why? Because AI can: tailor curriculums, scale-up effortlessly, and self-improve.
Tailor Curriculums – Students learn more quickly when instruction is tailored to their needs. With AI as a 1:1 tutor, they can advance at their own pace (spending more time on topics they find difficult and less time on ones they find easy). A 2015 RAND study with 11K students across 62 schools found that students with personalized learning experiences make greater gains in math and reading, and those gains accelerate the longer the student gets personalized learning. It's like compounding, but for academic outcomes.
Scale-up – Typically, tutors will see their students once or twice a week. There’s two reasons for this. First, the tutor’s time is a constraint. Even taken to the extreme, the tutor needs to eat, sleep, and pretend to understand the movie Tenet. Second, for the student (or whoever is paying), money is a constraint. Tutoring time is not cheap! AI has no such constraints. Already today, you could spend 24 hours straight using ChatGPT to have a fake conversation in the language of your choice, for free.
Self-improve – Not every teacher can be like Ms. Chinen. She was my incredible 7th grade Spanish teacher, who planted seeds that made Spanish fun and interesting for me. While there are definitely a ton of wonderful teachers, the ability to essentially give every student in the world the best teacher in that subject is by definition unbeatable. Not only could this AI teacher be the best there is… it would even get better over time. It would discover breakthroughs in learning that it immediately puts into practice, helping future students learn even faster.
Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first person to come to this realization… Here are a few companies already working on this:
Duolingo
In March 2023, they announced “Duolingo Max”, their new streaming TV app AI-powered language learning app running on OpenAI’s GPT-4. It can give detailed feedback to language learners, zooming out to see patterns of mistakes and reintroducing core concepts to help permanently fix those mistakes. It also has a feature that lets users have more authentic conversations in a foreign language. Rather than scripting every conversation a user might have ahead of time, Duolingo’s AI can react on-the-fly, but still evaluate the quality of a user’s responses in real time.
Khan Academy
In a June 2023 NYT article, they covered Khan Academy’s newest offering, an AI tutor for students in the company’s nonprofit Khan Lab School. The story talks about a class of 6th graders that can type messages to a personalized AI tutor while they work on practice problems. It gives them hints without giving away the answers, and it allows teachers to focus on only the toughest questions or on students having the most trouble. The AI-powered tutors are being pilot tested in a bunch of Newark, NJ schools.
Language Learning in the Long Term
If I’m being honest, learning a language might become obsolete and indulgent, like driving a stick shift car or writing in cursive. It could become something that is just for fun, rather than something you have to learn.
Why? Tech will do it for us. Already today, real-time translation apps can spit-out the text of what was said immediately after it leaves your friend’s mouth… but that won’t be the state of the art soon. We’ll probably have some way to filter audio so it immediately registers in languages we understand. When you’re in an airport, rather than only understanding the English speakers complaining about a flight delay or having an argument in hushed tones, you’ll understand them all…
So will we still need to learn languages? I don’t know… maybe not. Some might argue that if we understand each other then we’re done. But I think there’s still value there. The languages people speak are so closely tied to the culture they are incubated in. Even if you know the words, you still know nothing, Jon Snow.
Game of Thrones references aside, this ability to learn about culture through language is important to me, and it’s enough to keep me motivated to practice my Spanish. But maybe I’m already being nostalgic.
Wrapping Up
For whatever things do still need to be learned (even if languages aren’t in that category), I’m extremely excited about using AI to learn them more quickly. If you’ve had a pulse in the last 5 years you’ve probably heard that “the world’s information is at your fingertips”. And you’ll hear people throw out stats about how our smartphone has better access to information than past presidents did. Maybe that’s true, but the problem with that is we’re overwhelmed. There’s too much to read and watch. There are conflicting points of view. We don’t know what can be believed, and we don’t have time to sort it all out. Personalized, scalable, self-improving AI teachers would raise the bar by organizing that information into accurate, accessible piles. Anyone in the world with an internet connection could have a high-quality education, could pursue the smallest possible niche, etc.
But that’s enough futuristic fantasizing for several articles, so I’ll stop there. Hopefully parts of this future get you as excited as they get me. Hasta luego amigos.
Bonus Bullets
Quote of the Week:
“…in 3D simulation, we can play hide and seek, we can go get a high school diploma and walk down the aisle. We can have a birthday party. We can pretend we’re in the office together.”
— David Baszucki, CEO of Roblox
Quick News Reactions:
Meta is coming after Twitter — Meta launched “Threads” yesterday, which immitates Twitter. Expect some fiery comments/tweets from Elon…
AI armies — The US DoD is running a two-month test of LLM’s (the AI technique behind chatGPT) to improve the speed and strength of its decisionmaking
Vimeo’s CEO is walking away — The talented former-Salesforce exec. is leaving after just a few short years. Imagine trying to compete for YouTube’s table scraps…. maybe you would walk away too