A struggle many people have with language learning is the fear of failing miserably in public. Learning and mastering something new requires one to fail and push way beyond their comfort zones, especially for introverts. Being an introvert myself who has always enjoyed language and culture, I got the idea to start using language exchange platforms to practice my second language while teaching my first.
Right before booking my first session online, I got kind of nervous. I was scared that I’d sound stupid and get laughed at. Around the same time, OpenAI released the Whisper and Chat APIs. Perfect timing to create a solution for my anxiety!
Companion was made with the intention of feeling the ability to speak freely and have no pressure of being judged. Real human tutors are great, and almost none of them are judgmental at all, but internal anxiety doesn’t really understand this fact.
The site is not available currently, as ChatGPT now has the speaking feature which takes care of practically all that I wanted. In the future, I want to expand my wrapper to be able to spin up highly specific conversations very quickly. Otherwise, Companion will remain a quite straightforward wrapper: scenario set → language in → language out following the scenario in the target language and incorporating the level of corrections desired.