Irish is an interesting case, because the automated voices for it are excellent - but we may have to look at paying for translations - we have a bid in with Irish gov at the moment to do this, so fingers crossed…!
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The character comes partly from the inline commentary (which will be the same) and partly (in the older courses) from the ability to segue from the prompt to the commentary, which isn’t possible with a more automated approach - but when we’ve got the hang of producing a lot of new courses, we’ll be able to take a little time to think about how to make sure they’re entertaining as well 
We will be checking content, yes - everything we’ve checked so far has been flawless, but we expect more hiccups as we move outside the dominant languages.
And yes, the aim is to build a course for every language - which will mean paying for translation or opening up to crowdsourcing for languages that don’t have LLMs or useable grammar models. This will of course be dependent on turnover and/or partnership possibilities with governments etc…
And on how natural the languages will be, so far OpenAI has been excellent at responding to requests to use colloquial forms, so that seems quite promising at this stage
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Where the voices models are good enough, yes - but we’re expecting to have to pay (where possible) or crowdsource for the less tech supported languages.
And Russian, yes, seems very much to be on that list
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Oh my goodness, its norwegian and Irish that I am desperate to learn. Been using SaySomething for learning welsh I think that the SaySomething method is really good.
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I’ve heard a lot of your fluffy optimism and bitter caution over the years Aran so this is really great news and I’m over the moon for you.
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Great news Aran!
I am particularly looking forward to trying the Russian course, a language I have been struggling with using traditional language methods for well over a decade.
I know you’ve probably been asked this before, but any plans for a Breton / Breizh course via the medium of French?
Best wishes,
Kev
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Diolch Gruntius! I’ll show you the French taster this afternoon 
Kev - yes, Breton through the medium of French is very much on our target list - I’m not sure how well (or if at all) OpenAI supports Breton, so it’s possible that it will be in the second wave when we have some money to put into translations - but it will be right up at the top of that second wave, because other Celtic languages are very much at the front of our thinking
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@aran Just popping my head in here to reiterate that I’m still available for anything related to German, like checking translations or evaluating the quality of voice-overs – whatever helps to get German as a source (or target) language off the ground 
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Thats amazing Aran. I detest AI and we’re doing a fabulous job of training the monster in waiting (yn fy marn i) .However we cant go back to the dark ages unless we can do something along the lines of the wonderful “The Worlds End”. So that being the case, lets run with the positive response. Exciting times for SSi !!
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Sad face
I’m really uncomfortable with the idea of AI too, but if it brings in money for translations and recording with humans for some minority languages, maybe it’s worth it in the end? The tech is definitely impressive.
I even stick to the static mp3 files as I don’t much like the cut-and-paste feel of AutoMagic’s generated sentences… even though all the words were at least recorded by humans! (Btw, are there / were there ever such files for Spanish?)
But, a bit uncomfortable for me or not, it clearly works really well for a lot of people. That’s what we want, at the end of the day.
I’m sure the SSi team will do their very best with whatever’s next.
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If you are asking if there are mp3s for Spanish, they’re here. I assume you can access it, but when I did the Spanish course it was a pay-per-course model rather than subscription like Welsh.
Like many I have concerns about AI, all of technical, existential and ethical, but the genie isn’t going back in the bottle. In SSi’s case the use is at least to the overall benefit of society and will help humans better themselves, rather than make themselves obsolete.
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As promised, Aran showed me the French taster yesterday and I have to say that it looks and sounds really, really good … I’d like to put everyone who’s mentioned AI at ease, the voices sound COMPLETELY natural. I’ll probably never learn more than Welsh, Spanish and maybe French but the prospect of all that language learning choice at our fingertips is extremely exciting. And the idea that in the future anyone in the world will be able to learn any other language they fancy is incredible. Well done SSi, amazing work.
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I agree with your assessment mostly, though (whether or not SSi could have afforded to do anything else) this AI business has already gone some way towards making translators and recording artists obsolete…
I know we like to be positive here, but it does bother me.
Anyway.
Thanks for the link. At least in my browser, it takes me to Spanish AutoMagic, not mp3 files. I’ve gone round in circles a few times now - I go to Challenges, it’s Welsh. I change language to Spanish… and it’s AutoMagic. No Spanish mp3 files to be seen. 
I’m on the Welsh course anyway, I just went looking out of interest to compare how much material there is for each language, and it’s weird how for me, no Spanish “Challenges” seem to exist. Not important right now though.
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Well to satisfy your curiosity: I can see 2 levels of “new course” (25 lessons each, these are what I did), the tourist course (looks very handy, can’t remember if I did it), and 1 level of “old course”, which I had never noticed before.
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Diolch @Hendrik - really appreciate that - we’ll definitely take you up on it in the not-too-distant future, German is very much towards the top of the list
I certainly agree with everyone that AI is a complicated field and creates plenty of opportunity for poor behaviour, and will need careful regulation. My hunch is that over the next few years, AI will lead to increasing demands for UBI to avoid social unrest, and I hope very much we get to UBI.
We’re a very narrow usecase as far as AI goes - we’re making use of AI-enabled translation technology and AI-enabled voice creation technology to provide content, and we’re then bringing that content into our own proprietary structures in order to create courses - those structures make no further use of AI at the moment. It’s true that those technologies are going to put some people out of work (or dramatically change the nature of the work they do) - in our particular case, it’s also true that we wouldn’t have been able to afford to build more than a tiny handful of new languages otherwise.
We will (probably next year) be able to use our own datasets to start comparing learner behaviour/production which will allow us to personalise the content better and also to give insights into levels of achievement, both of which will be very high value for the individual learner - that will involve some level of closed AI in terms of how we compare inside the dataset, but that’s really just a fancy way of talking about using mathematics!
Verity, I’ll ask Ivan about accessing the Spanish mp3 files - they should be at https://en.saysomethingin.com/spanish/level1/challenge1 (as already posted) and that opens properly for me, but our membership website does sometimes do some strange stuff based on user access settings, so it’s probably our fault! I’ll let you know as soon as I hear from him
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I agree with you hear too, but as an optimist I think SSi growing could create new jobs too. I think if more content is added beyond where the levels currently end then as you get further and further, the content will need to diverge more and more. That creates openings for course creators and cultural experts to guide the work, and more proof-readers to check it.
I also wonder if, in the long term, the more popular courses could be re-done with real voices to get some more variety and variation in there? But I’d rather see the effort going into the courses AI just can’t do before that.
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We can keep dreaming, Aran. The exciting news that we’ve digressed a bit from is evidence that your dreams in particular can come true!
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Yes, I think there are some interesting decision points ahead of us - in the short term, we’ll be putting increases in turnover back into tech dev and marketing, but if we do get through to genuine surplus, the balance between ‘real-ifying’ AI output and supporting smaller languages that don’t have the AI output will be an interesting one. I’ve certainly heard at least some AI voices (in several languages) that I wouldn’t be able to tell from humans, but if we get feedback/data that some courses are unpopular because they fall into the uncanny valley, we’ll certainly pay attention.
Perhaps the most likely outcome will be around licensing ‘real’ voices to model for the AI, once we get a bit closer to a consensus on the right balance between work/reward in that field…
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Verity, I’m told that link should be fixed for you in the fairly near future
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