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0 pointscelltalk1y ago0 comments

Thank you! That’s a great suggestion maybe we can show the latest generated stories by other users.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

PaulRobinson1y ago· 3 in thread

That just leads to abuse. Think about it.

Go get something out of Project Gutenberg that is popular, and not too long.

Translate it into 3-4 major languages. Give those away for free.

Even better, test your translations against actual public domain translations if they exist, and be transparent about WER for each language.

If you want this to be a business, you’re going to have to do some serious business-like things.

freddie_mercury1y ago

FWIW translating into "major languages" isn't necessarily much help. If I speak one of the supported languages, say, Vietnamese, me being able to look at the German/Chinese/French is useless because 1) I can't read those, I already said I read Vietnamese and 2) the translation models often vary widely between languages so doing well on French doesn't mean they will do well on something else.

trinix9121y ago

> 2) the translation models often vary widely between languages so doing well on French doesn't mean they will do well on something else.

Especially this. I often come across AI products that claim to do well in 100+ languages, show some really good DE/FR/SP/RU examples, then I try it with my language (Slovene) and am just disappointed. If you claim to support all those languages, please have a sample result in all of them. Even if they aren't all equally good, it comes across as more genuine than making bold claims that anyone who speaks a language with < 10 million speakers knows likely aren't true.

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PaulRobinson1y ago

I think that's why calculating and showing the accuracy metrics (like WER) against known good translations, is useful. You can even highlight words that the model struggles with, giving the reader useful context.

Translation models are getting better all the time - it's a weird artefact of transformer architectures that got missed in the GenAI hype, that they're pretty great at translation, especially across languages with smaller training corpuses - but you should definitely know if the text you're reading is only likely to be 90% "correctly" translated.

roel_v1y ago

I think, judging from your responses in this thread, that you're focusing too much on the 'generating stories' part. IMO that's the least attractive/useful part of your offering. The 'read something in two languages' is what use useful to your users. I made something not quite like your app but related: a tool to translate (epub) ebooks into two-column ebooks with a translated version on one side, so you're not constantly googling/chatgpting things. What you have has the potential for more interactivity though (like, my dual language ebooks can't highlight words to match from left to right or vice versa). I would love your tool if it wasn't for the 'the content is AI generated' part. I'm not looking to add more AI slop into my life, but that doesn't mean I'm against it for actually useful purposes, like translations/language learning.

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