Babbel's AI voice trainer: Beta now also available on the iPhone

Speaking is considered the supreme discipline when learning a new language – and a skill that conventional language learning apps such as Duolingo or Babbel have long been unable to teach. Recently, however, start-ups have shown how this problem can possibly be solved: with speech trainers based on generative AI. This in turn forced the big players in the industry to act. And so, at the end of September, Duolingo integrated an AI speech trainer in the form of an animated cartoon character into its educational app with "Videocall mit Lilli", with whom you can practise speaking in a foreign language – at least as part of a paid "Max" subscription.

Competitor Babbel announced shortly afterwards that it would also introduce such a function by the end of 2024. The Berlin-based company has not yet implemented this plan, but has expanded the beta, which is open to all its customers: The function, which has since been renamed from "Conversation Coach" to "AI Conversation Partner", can now be accessed not only in the Babbel app on Android smartphones, but also on iPhones with the current version.

Babbel's beta

The beta in question is still only available for the source language English, but the target language is no longer – only Spanish, as in the first c't report on the new function – but also French, Italian and German, for example. In return, however, Babbel has apparently significantly reduced the scope: for the combination of English as the source language and Spanish as the target language, users were originally given access to seven role-playing games each on the topics of greetings, experiences and plans as well as shopping. According to Babbel, these covered the learning levels of the European Framework of Reference for Languages. There are now only two role-playing games in the app, all of which are at level A1.

The free chat, which could only be accessed with Latin American Spanish as the target language, has disappeared completely. What has remained is the option for the AI to take turns spinning a story with the user or having the user guess a term.

Like most AI speech coaches, but unlike Duolingo's Lilli, the Conversation Coach displays a transcription of its output. If you don't understand it, you can speak the sentence again and also have a translation displayed. If you are still stumped, you can ask Babbel's AI for possible answers, including a translation, and even have it speak them back to you.

Too helpful

For voice input, you press a button and speak your sentence or sentences. Here, too, you first get a transcription, can have the recording played back again, edit the input manually using the keyboard or speak the answer again. Unfortunately, at this point, it was still apparent that the AI in the beta version often simply corrected our input of its accord so that it ended up correctly in the transcription. That can't be the point. Babbel should do some more work here before the final release of Conversation Coach. (nij)