ESL and AI

 It's here! You can now practice SPEAKING a second language using AI.  FREE.  This is the my first blog entry on the subject but not the last.

Go to Gliglish.com to converse with a native language "speaker". However, you get only 10 minutes per day.  I tested it out using French and Spanish, since my mother tongue is English.  I used up my minutes pretty fast just figuring out how the site works.  I chose French from a big list of languages. Gliglish (who appears as a young lady) greeted me, then, to reply, I needed to click a microphone icon to start my response.  Then I needed to click a red square to stop.  Just stopping talking was not enough.  I steered the "Hello, how are you" type of conversation onto the subject of pets.  I said I had a dog and a cat.  Gliglish said she had a cat.  It often took the AI a long time to respond but I think that resulted from my own ineptness in "turning off" the "microphone" promptly after I'd given her a statement.  Sometimes I would not realize I hadn't turned the mike on, at which point the screen would pop up some helpful examples of things I might say.

Next I tried Spanish.  This time I got a list of suggested subjects.  Unfortunately, upon choosing one, the screen said that I was now out of minutes.  I logged back in using the DuckDuckGo browser (rather than Google) and was able to go forward with a conversation on the subject of prices -- for the moment, anyway.  I asked how much a Spanish dictionary cost and got a price. Gliglish asked what country I was in.  I answered "Los Estados Unidos" and said a Spanish dictionary was expensive here.  (Actually, I don't think that's true if I get a used one.)

Overall, this ai app has great potential.  I'll go back to become more adept at using it, then evaluate how sophisticated a conversation it might be capable of.

Another ai app offering free usage with limited features is TalkPal.  Upon creating an account it says that the free trial lasts 14 days.  A 24 month premium subscription costs only $4.69 a month. (For now, anyway.)  That's really cheap.  But I can't start the free trial without entering a credit card to be billed after the trial.  So I didn't go forward.  I may try another day to see if I can get a limited-feature trial without entering a credit card.

Last but not least for today, people have simply been using the free versions of search chatbots to practice English.  Here's a YouTube video by Shivangi Gupta explaining how to do this. And here's another video comparing ChatGPT to ai apps with free freatures by Cloud English.