Hello, anonymous readers.
It’s January first, a new year, and there’s an idea keeping me awake. Whenever that happens, I write it down and send it to someone, and I almost always fall asleep afterward. Today, you’re the one.
I want to simulate possible conversations in English about all sorts of subjects, so I’ve been thinking about an app that simulates conversations. It could be the active sort, and send me a message in the morning:
“Hi Diego, how was your night?”
Then some predefined answers come up, the ones used most often in English.
- A. It was great
- B. Same as always
- C. I didn’t sleep at all
- D. …
Depending on which one I choose I get another message.
“Oh no, what happened?”
- A. I felt ill, I think I’m coming down with something
- B. The dog wouldn’t stop barking
- C. The baby cried
- D. I had an idea that wouldn’t let me sleep.
Every answer brings in a new question or some tip, as if it were a casual conversation using the typical expressions and phrases.
My answers could be sent just by saying one of the options out loud, to train my pronunciation, and later I could go back over that history and look at my progress. It would be a sort of diary.
But my main goal as a user is knowing the range of the most common answers to everyday questions, and training my pronunciation.
And in the future the app could have some intelligence to detect whether my pronunciation is any good, and maybe understand sentences outside the list of options and carry the conversation on by interpreting what I said.
The questions themselves could be in audio too, using one of those text to speech technologies, simulating a phone call… Wooow. Imagine listening to the whole conversation at the end, and being able to share it, with friends or even with my teacher. It would be beautiful.
After a while of questions about various subjects it could map out the user’s interests and bring recent news about whatever I showed most interest in, know that the person is out of work and simulate a job interview, an opinion about the elections, some flirting, a trip.
Or it could be more passive, and the user picks the themes to simulate conversations about.
I have a feeling this is going to be the year of artificial intelligence, let’s see.
The next day I’d get another message:
“So Diego, did you sleep any better?”
- A. No
- B. More or less
- C. Of course, I sent my idea to somebody else so it could keep them awake instead. 😜
Bye
Diego
Update 1: March 2023
Here we are, some years later, and this is an idea we can easily build, or there are already many apps doing that. It still kind of excites me to build.