Yes, it takes commitment to master a language. In the case of Japanese, which traditionally takes the most weeks to master when coming from English, we made Japanese Complete based on frequency analysis to help speed up the process of acquisition. With 777 kanji carefully selected by frequency you can get 90% coverage of kanji in the wild. This is about a third of the "daily use" set of ~2200 kanji so the process is greatly accelerated. If you're interested in seeing what 777 kanji look like, I recently created a small kanji quiz game that quizzes by English meaning words [0].
Voice recordings are turned to text via in-browser Speech-to-Text (STT the opposite of TTS) and then piped / sent to Grok as text. These are privately sent via my API key to Grok. I don't hold on to them at all except for sending them over the wire to Grok. So storage duration on our side is as minimal as possible, typically just a few seconds while it is sent to Grok and a reply is formulated. However, one should be aware that the whole conversation is sent to Grok from within our lesson pages, so the whole chat persists for a session until you close out the tab or move to another lesson page, at which point it is reset.
It's very beautiful, lovely work. Sleek and shiny, it's a device that begs for interaction, which is important in something that you'll be engaging with every 24-30 minutes. I would like a version of the display to show grains of sand falling through a digital hourglass.
Team up with some loyal friends who are effective at getting things accomplished and make a company. If you can dream it you can achieve it. Especially now, with the barrier for creating products being lower than it has ever been. Of course, it probably helps to have some internship experience or learn from someone who has already built a business so you don't make all the same errors that can be easily avoided. But in general I think we are telling people that they are not ready to make businesses, when in fact the tools are getting very good, so good that it might be advisable to advise people to start making businesses straight out of school.
Hey HN! I’m pumped to share Aiko, my Japanese tutor AI—learning Japanese should feel like chatting with a friend. Check it out at https://japanesecomplete.com/aiko.html —no signup needed for the demo!
Aiko uses xAI’s Grok (latest model) to craft natural Japanese replies and AWS Polly (Mizuki voice) to speak them. Pick a topic like "Greetings" or "Ordering Food," hit "Click to Record," and talk to her in Japanese—she listens via Web Speech API, responds, and plays it back. It’s real-time, with a mic level visualizer and auto-scrolling chat, all in client-side JS (React + Tailwind).
This ties into my Japanese Complete project (data-driven, 90% real-world Japanese coverage). Sold a $450 lifetime plan this morning, so I figured it’s HN time. Next up: server-side polish, auth, and more topics. Would love your take—especially on UX or scaling ideas!
Also, there are four previous postings under the sova account, so this is not exactly new. Show HN is not for advertising products.
- Aiko: Learn Japanese Effortlessly, with MMLM-Powered Digital Sensei (japanesecomplete_com/aiko-announcement)
2 points | sova | 1 year ago
- Aiko, learn Japanese rapidly with her help (japanesecomplete_com/aiko-announcement)
1 points | sova | 1 year ago
- Aiko: MMLM (Multimodal Language Model)-Powered Digital Sensei for Japanese (japanesecomplete_com/articles/?p=1574)
3 points | sova | 1 year ago
- Aiko – A New Wave in Learning Japanese – AI-Powered Digital Sensei (japanesecomplete_com/articles/?p=1536)
6 points | sova | 1 year ago
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You can use the product for free at the link I shared for Show HN. It is true this is incorporated into the broader lesson plan now, but initially I had just worked it out as a demo and was excited to show it to the community. I appreciate your vigilance although can't help but think it's misplaced.
I’m firmly convinced that a lot of the acoustic tricks that AirPods Pro do to achieve noise canceling involve ultrasonic harmonics, perhaps unintentionally - and this has created an epidemic of tinnitus among their users.
Precisely. Henry C. Carey, Abraham Lincoln's chief economic adviser, would say that the article's platitudes about "interdependence" miss the fundamental issue - it's not interdependence itself but the _type_ of interdependence that matters. Carey's economic nationalism recognized that exporting raw materials only to import finished goods creates colonial-style dependency, not prosperity. Carey's "harmony of interests" demanded domestic manufacturing capabilities that transform local resources into higher-value products, creating what he called "association" between producers and consumers within the same economic sphere. When we outsource manufacturing to non-democratic nations with concentrated labor power, we're not creating mutual benefit but establishing extractive relationships that hollow out our productive capacity. True economic resilience comes from rebuilding local manufacturing prowess that completes the production cycle domestically - something the globalist narrative conveniently ignores while democratic nations gradually surrender their self-sufficiency in the name of "efficiency." Carey's approach would actually transcend zero-sum thinking by creating genuine wealth through productive transformation rather than mere exchange, in turn unlocking fresh potential for growth, when nations develop their complete productive capacities instead of competing for shares of existing production.
Haha, according to this tool I am unemployed again! And I had a very productive week, by the way. Of course, it doesn't take into account how useful my creative pursuits were, it looks like it's evaluating me on my contributions to the mission to Mars? I didn't know the bureaucracy was tasked with that.
I think the trade is not only privacy but complexity. If I have to be a full-time system administrator for my one machine or set of machines, it really takes a toll. I'd rather just hand that work to a conglomerate. Linux in theory could also do this, but nobody has nailed it yet. By far the best advances have been package managers and those are only a fractional solution. For a person who does not have hours to pour into study and slamming their head against a keyboard in despair when something inexplicable is off, it is really hard to recommend something as fragile as linux. And I don't mean fragile if you "know what you're doing," I mean fragile for someone who doesn't know what GRUB is, doesn't know what a kernel does, doesn't need to ever see a compilation flag, and suddenly they're exposed to all the above when an update goes sour. There are, of course, efforts to make things return to a graceful state gracefully, but until there's an off-the-shelf solution for "rescue my machine remotely" that can run through all phases of the boot process, I think most people are gonna want to use something where they can blame a vendor instead of their own ignorance or lack of time to bone up on a topic as nested as open-source operating systems.
