Using Bing chat (Skype) as your personal language trainer

TLDR

You are learning a new language, such as Spanish, and have progressed beyond the level of popular tools such as “Babbel” or “Duolingo”.
You can now use Transformer LLMs as your personal language trainer, as shown below using the example of “Bing chat”, now integrated into Skype as a free technical preview.

At the time of writing you can use it to learn English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese.

Example conversation of a student learning Spanish

bing chat example bing chat example bing chat example bing chat example bing chat example

What do you need to use this feature

  • Download the latest version of Skype for your platform
  • Sign in to your Skype account (free) or register a new one
  • There will be a chat called “Bing - your AI copilot”.

What prompt do you need to use to start the conversation or to change the topic?

Whenever you want to start a new conversation or want to change the topic, send newtopic as a one-word message to Bing Chat.

bing chat newtopic

You will then need to prompt the model (give it a context in which to respond), for example, using the following prompt, translated into the target language
you intend to learn:

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I am English and I am learning Spanish. You are my language teacher. 
I would like to have a conversation with you on a certain topic. 
You will answer me in terms of content, but you will also point out my linguistic mistakes.

Today's topic: <replace with the topic you want to discuss>

A concrete example of learning Spanish and talking about cooking recipes could be

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Soy alemán y estoy aprendiendo español. 
Usted es mi profesor de idiomas. 
Me gustaría mantener una conversación con usted sobre un tema determinado. 
Usted me responderá en cuanto al contenido, pero también me señalará mis errores lingüísticos.

Tema de hoy: Recetas

To easily translate the prompt into your target language you can use Deepl or Google translate.

Affiliations

I am in no way related to Skype, Microsoft, Babbel, Duolingo, Deepl or Google and do not get any payment from them.

However if you like this blog post you can pay me a coffee https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=JBFJMV35LX5AY