How new technology can bridge the “confidence gap” in language education
A new technology has become available which promises to unlock the possibility of creating genuine “AI language partners”.
By Ben Whately, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Memrise
I studied French for 8 years at school. I passed my exams, I can read French pretty decently if I need to.
But what happens if you put me in a conversation? I freeze. I clam-up. I look at my shoes, shuffle my feet and try to control the urge to run and hide.
Why? Because I can’t actually *speak* French. I can’t turn my knowledge of French into a useful active skill in speaking French.
It turns out that a huge proportion of language learners report the same problem: language lessons on their own, however good they are, don’t give us the confidence we need to start speaking in a new language. When we lack that confidence, we never practice, and without practice we never give our confidence a chance to grow. It’s a vicious circle.
This is what we call the “confidence gap.”
This is something that I’ve spent much of the last 12 years trying to address. In the last 2 years, a new technology has become available which promises to unlock this problem once and for all: the technology is called Large Language Models, the most famous of which is GPT-3.
What makes GPT-3 remarkable is that it can produce written content that is indistinguishable from human-written text. For example, you can type in a question and it will reply to you in a way that you literally cannot tell is not a human reply. You can ask it to write a story, and it will write something that looks human-written.
It is possible to build on top of this capability of GPT-3 to create an app that can hold conversations. We’ve actually done this at Memrise, and we’ve made it work in more than 20 languages. So you can talk to the computer, and it replies back in a way that feels just like a human reply, and will talk to you about literally any subject under the sun.
This technology has unlocked the possibility of creating genuine “AI language partners”.
Why’s that so important?
Firstly, it’s a game changer for anyone who is learning a language and doesn’t have ready access to native speakers of that language. That turns out to be most language learners. Now, practice doesn’t need to be confined to weekly video calls or other paid tuition.
Secondly, this technology can have huge economic implications for the world’s learners of English. The majority of the world’s English learners are from countries with lower purchasing power than native English speaking countries. That means that learning to speak English can be hugely economically beneficial; however, on the flip side, it also means that it is very expensive to find native speakers to practice speaking with you. Native English speakers expect a higher hourly rate because they live in countries which are more expensive. People who have the least money have to pay the people with the most money in order to gain this key skill. A huge portion of the world’s population is effectively blocked from accessing English language practice by this price differential.
Large Language Models like GPT-3 and the AI language tutors that can be built on top of it can change the game here: infinite, ulta low-cost, native-speaker-quality language practice is now available to anyone with a device and an internet connection. This will have profound implications for language learning and for social mobility across the world.
About Memrise
Memrise is an award-winning language learning system with over 50 million users. Specialising in combining cognitive science, powerful tech and entertaining content, Memrise makes language learning genuinely recreational. We offer 200 language combinations across 24 languages on our website, iOS and Android apps. By leveraging lots of brain science and plenty of humour, we’re striving to enrich people’s consciousness and help people achieve confident, real-world language skills in just a few short months. Follow the link to visit Memrise: https://www.memrise.com/
