Hacker News in Slow Italian

[lakySK]

There are plenty of podcasts to listen to some slow basic Italian, but often they just talk about random things I'm not that interested in. Nothing a few hours of tinkering with Python cannot solve these days!

Introducing Hacker News in Slow Italian. Each episode is generated automatically, using GPT4 API to summarise the top articles on Hacker News and then fed to Play.ht for text-to-speech.

The (very short) code is available on Github: https://github.com/laky/hn-slow-italian

[lakySK]

Let me know in here if there is a particular language you'd like to see for this!

Not gonna lie, the costs run in order of dollars per episode, so if you are keen on listening to this, let me know, otherwise it would be a waste of money :)

[hugs]

I would love this for French. How do you want to handle modifying the code for other languages on GitHub? A new separate project fork per language, or a pull request to the current one? Slightly problematic that "Italian" is in the top level project name if it's going to be configurable for other languages.

Also, add a tip jar somewhere so we can chip in!

[marcyb5st]

As a native Italian speaker I can tell you two things:

1. The translation is great. I actually never used ChatGPT for translating content and this opens a new world for me.

2. The text-to-speech is good, but less so than the translation itself. It still is completely understandable, but if you are a learner I believe it could cause some bad habits over time. For instance, at around the 30 second mark, the translation includes the word "immergervi" (immerse yourselves). The voice puts the accent on the 2nd "e", while it should be on the first one.

Anyway, great tool. And I would help to chime in for different languages (trying to improve my Spanish). Put a tip jar somewhere as others suggested :)

[KerrickStaley]

I would potentially pay for this in Mandarin, although I'd be wary of the quality vs human-produced sources.

I often practice by reading sites like https://cn.wsj.com/, https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/trad, https://cn.nytimes.com/, or https://big5.ftchinese.com/. These are all text news sites so they help with reading comprehension and grammar but not at all with listening. I'm not aware of any similar audio sources, especially not ones that use professional-level language but slow it down so it's accessible to language learners. So you'd be in a unique niche.

[ageitgey]

Would be really cool in Spanish!

[CamelRocketFish]

This is great! I didn’t see an option to slow the playback down to 0.5 as 1.0 is still fast for a beginner.

[scotty79]

I'd really love to hear Portuguese. What else did you do to immerse yourself in the language you are learning? I have trouble to even force youtube to give me content in Portuguese.

[user7894635]

Would love to hear Russian! Been working on it for awhile but similarly struggle to converse

[gus_massa]

Why Italian? What is Slow Italian? [Hi from Argentina!]

[mattkohl]

This is great!!!

Would it be possible to provide an English translation of the Italian transcription? Seeing them side by side would be enormously helpful.

[huhtenberg]

French! Would love to have this in French.

Between Italian, German, Spanish and French I find it's the most difficult language to parse by ear. The lack of pauses between words, the omnipresent en and y, their numerous contracted forms and generally speaking as if they are being charged by the millisecond makes it for an extremely frustrating experience sometimes.

[tlamponi]

Not directly related to this, but what about a Firefox extension for LinguallyAI?

I know that the Firefox user base sadly is relatively small nowadays, but maybe you're already using only the cross-browser WebExtensions API, so it might not be _that_ much extra work.

[martopix]

I would love Swahili, I've been looking for a simple and short Swahili podcast that is not on religious topics and that's not easy, I could only find the Swahili news of the Japanese national radio (lol).

And yes, ChatGPT speaks Swahili well.

[joeatwork]

This one, in Italian, is really exciting! Thank you so much for making it!

[mattnewton]

I don't know the state of text-to-speech for Mandarin Chinese but I would definitely listen to that if it's as good as this seems to be for Italian.

[maguirre]

I have been learning Italiano for the past couple of years. This is awesome thank you

[tehrob]

European Portuguese from Portugal!

[maury91]

I would like to see Lithuanian

[shankr]

German please. Might help me improve my German.

[rolandog]

For me, Dutch, as I'm still learning it!

[waterpowder]

Vietnamese with a northern accent please :D

[misiti3780]

Anche io vorrei lo spagnolo!

[federicotdn]

German would be amazing!

[alexkowalenko]

French, en français!

[35mm]

Español por favor!

[ricardobayes]

Spanish please :)

[Pamar]

Italian native here.

The quality of "podcast" is really really good. I spotted only one mispronounciation in the first couple minutes ("siete pronti ad immergervi...": immergervi had the stress on the wrong syllabe) but the rest was extremely good - kudos!

[manuelmoreale]

Unrelated to the product but if you ever want to practice your Italian while chatting about web related stuff hit me up. More than happy to help.

[squarefoot]

I'm a few minutes into it and it seems really well done, save for a few quirks, mostly pauses between words and misplaced accents. Curiously, some English words were spoken in perfect English, while others sounded like coming from someone not aware of the pronunciation differences with respect to Italian. Some compression artifacts can however be heard, especially when using headphones.

btw: not sure what slow means; to me the talking speed sounds quite normal.

[lakySK]

Thanks! This was by far the best Italian voice I've found, but definitely not perfect...

The "slow" refers to the genre of podcasts like News in Slow Italian. Mostly using simple language and slow speed. I've set the speed to 85%, might need to dial it down even slower it seems :)

[vba616]

TIL that the Slow Food movement originated in Italy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Food

[Lynbarry]

Wow this is a really nice idea. I also have been learning italian with Duolingo for quite a while but have hit a plateau once I finished the course.

So far I've only listened to the beginning, but that sounds like exactly the right difficulty to improve my listening comprehension.

Do you have an approach to improve speaking italian (not only understanding)? Because that is the end goal for me and something that Duolingo doesn't really teach that much.

[lakySK]

Pushed the latest Italian episode to the website! Let me know what you think!

And today's special episode is in Portuguese! Any learners out there? https://twitter.com/LinguallyAI/status/1662570120684662784

[InCityDreams]

Got an opportunity to give this a proper listen - really good. As a non-native Italian speaker, I'm impressed: and now I can have something that can accompany me to work. Thanks, great work.

[antirez]

It's a shame that Play.ht quality is so bad for Italian, compared to English voices.

[lakySK]

Oh, 100%

And this is already the best one I've found. Trust me, you don't want to hear some of the Italian text-to-speech stuff I've come across during this search...

[Alles]

yeah, you can hear some english pronunciation forced in sometimes but overall is pretty good

[wnolens]

Impressive, will favorite this.

I'm travelling in Italy right now for the first time and am totally in love with it. It's the first country I've ever traveled to that I can see myself returning to multiple times.

[InCityDreams]

Had a chance to try this - really good, with just minor odd pronunciations, but everything else is top quality and, more importantly, very enjoyable. Thanks.

[bombolo]

> siete pronti per immergèrvi

hehehe

[dotcoma]

First paragraph: accent on immergèrvi (on the second ‘e’) is wrong, it should be immèrgervi (first ‘e’).

This said, I am still impressed.

[dizhn]

Great idea. Even if gpt makes a factual mistake you're still learming Italian. Brilliant. You hacked the system.

[tuatoru]

Is the typo (learming) intentional? If so this is brilliant sarcasm.

[TurkishPoptart]

Is there something like this for German or Russian? Thanks!!

[lakySK]

New Italian episode uploaded. Check out the website.

[fmiras]

Mama mia, good post

[GaggiX]

Mamma mia*, mama is spanish.

[dariosalvi78]

grazie, molto carino, e funziona bene!