My first language is Afrikaans, which is a somewhat niche language and hard to find teachers/conversation buddies outside South Africa. (I live in USA now)

I've been using Gemini to live chat in Afrikaans and do impromptu Afrikaans grammar lessons during my solo drives around town. It is phenomenal at speaking the language - like, it really shocks my family members when they hear it.

This is probably the most joy I get from any of my usages of LLMs/AIs. It's been really, really nice getting to speak my language regularly again. =)

So, I'm excited about this release and live chat getting better. I also hope the other frontier labs pick up niche languages like this as well so that I have more options.

I have a similar experience using Gemini for quick Catalan translations for iOS apps given enough context.

I once asked it to summarize The Hobbit in Catalan to explain it to my daughter before sleep. I was expecting a lot of mistakes as I see regularly if I ask anything in my native language when using GPT or Claude, but it was surprisingly good. I was going just to kind of skim ahead and retell it my own way, but ended up almost saying it verbatim because it was good already.

She loves Zelda so I asked it to explain the story of Breath of The Wild keeping the original names, and to make it fun, etc.. I was surprised again. I did retell some bits in my own style and taste but it is very convincing.

I haven't tried Catalan on newer models like GTP-6 Astra or Fable tho. We have all these benchmarks based on software development, and AGI, etc.. but it would be cool to have some language benchmarks for different communities.

As I work in english and use them in english, I wonder if using LLMs in a different language to code renders a different result as well. Like, if some of these benchmarks were made in other languages, would the result be similar.

I love Gemini in Google Maps for long drives. I start getting bored of music and podcasts and start grilling it with random questions I've always wondered about.

Yeah Gemini has been consistently better than open ai's chat in icelandic, but I would still say it's far from passable as natural sounding. Lots of grammar errors and the pronunciation sounds like a non native speaker.

My father-in-law was saying the same thing about Gemini 12 months ago regarding the Afrikaans speech. I've tried a few of them in my studies but none of them could seem to switch between English/Afrikaans except Gemini. It's an interesting time to be a language learner

As jy wil, ons kan saam praat op Discord :) maar my Afrikaans is sleg

I've been building a language learning app which uses AI voice chat to let people practice. Would that be something interesting for you to try out? It's all still rough, but we've been learning Japanese with it and its pretty cool.

It’s literally translation technology told to guess what’s most likely next instead of translate what it was given.

It makes total sense it’s good at regurgitating the edge cases of language.

for me the live mode in androids google translate app has been as close as it gets to perfect for traveling cannot believe it is a free service after trying so many others

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