Ask HN: Is anyone using AI conversation partners?

The ChatGPT mobile app in voice conversation mode works quite well for language practice with one important call-out: you have to give it a topic at the beginning otherwise it won't be able to drive the conversation forward and will stick to banal pleasantries.

So what I usually do is pick a random blurb in the news and paste the entire thing along with the Reuters link at the beginning and inform chatgpt that we'll be carrying on language practice specifically over that topic of discussion.

I've used this to carry an hour long foreign language practice in Spanish while walking my dog without even needing to look at my phone.

For very popular languages: there are tons of human-made content specific for language learning, which is always far better than what any LLM can offer.

For low resource / endangered languages: LLMs still suck.

So no, I don't see the point of this beyond being cheap to produce and cheap to consume.

I made a phone-based one to teach me how to cold call because I fucking hate cold calling but needed to learn to sell

I had a prompt for this. It works perfectly well, but its not sticky or engaging enough somehow. I think if you could interact with other real people, or if it interacted with a game engine somehow (i'm thinking something like Myst) and there was world persistence it would be more engaging. In the chat I bought some train tickets and got a haircut before I got bored, and haven't resumed the "quest".

[1]you are an interactive storyteller, but your objective is to teach me German, you need to create an interactive text environment like a "choose your own adventure" book, if i answer in German, then correct my German and proceed, if I answer in english then translate to German and proceed. The storyline starts with me arriving in Germany as a study abroad student, all other communication should be in German

I just built a conversational AI and tried it - me talking to Santa. I find the experience quite a pleasant surprise!

If you'd like to try, send me an email.

One of my first character cards, a Latin tutor, was modeled after Father Reginald Foster.

It was overly ambitious for the foundational models at the time, even more so for any small enough for local use prior to quantization, but I think any premier reasoning model today would work well enough.

Actually, I did see one really cool use case. A guy was using a chatbot to help him revise for his uni courses. Not just chatting for the sake of it, but actually learning. It was super fluid and the whole thing was way sharper than the usual “how was your day?” stuff.

Wish I could remember the name of the app, if anyone knows it, let me know !

No, and even if they could perfectly replicate human speech patterns w/ long memories why would I want that? Why do you want fake "AI" friends? I find that very sad...

I need to talk

I’m curious if you can check the app I’m working on to see if it has the same issue. I tried to make it less open ended with specific goals you need to achieve in conversation. (Shameless plug: fluent.im)

Am I using them: No.

Do I find these tools helpful?

How would a bot that has no impact on the world itself be useful? The only thing it could affect would be me. Which is less useful than everything non-bot that I can talk to (i.e. people), since people can both impact the world and affect me anyway.

To be honest, nothing beats practising with a real person. Maybe you could instead build a new and cooler way to have short chats with random people from different languages instead, which would be much better than interacting with a soulless piece of tech.

Is there anyone currently capable of developing an AI soulmate, where conversations aren’t dull and boring? It could truly understand you, know your past, and even anticipate your future.

I've been using Superfluent to help learn Spanish and have found it helpful.

Lots of potential, but also a big risk of OpenAI/Anthropic/Google releasing an update in 6 months that will kill your product.

I’m not sure I follow. What is the use-case for an “AI conversation partner”? Does it do something else than what ChatGPT already does?

I use ChatGPT and grok voice multiple times per week. There is nothing those 2 combined cannot do.

My wife says chatgpt is her best friend

I have honestly just been using ChatGPT itself. It is devastatingly good for written language learning and I suspect it is only a matter of time before it is that good for verbal needs.