# A Spanish-Speaking Robot in my Pocket

I've recently started using ChatGPT voice chat to practice Spanish, and it works surprisingly well. I don't know if I'll have the discipline to keep doing it after the novelty wears off, but I've already spoken more Spanish in the last week than in the last fifteen years combined.

I started learning Spanish in middle school, and by the end of high school could make myself understood. I might need some circuitous phrasing to work around missing vocabulary, and I certainly abused periphrastics to avoid tricky tenses, but if I was dropped into an unfamiliar environment and needed to communicate I could do that. \[1\]

With minimal Spanish in my daily life, my skills have atrophied a lot. Most of my utterances over the past decade have been trying to say something to Julia without the kids understanding: "quieres ir comprar helado?" This is a poor way to maintain language skills, because "actual Spanish" isn't actually a constraint: all that matters is that Julia can understand it and the kids can't. If I forget a word, taking the English equivalent, adding an "-o", and pronouncing it as if it's Spanish still works.

I've tried to practice Spanish with other English speakers, but not only is it easy to diverge from actual Spanish, it's also much less fun than speaking freely in our stronger language. I've considered matchmaking apps, pairing with someone looking to practice English, but I don't want to do the English component, don't want to schedule calls, and expect the tech would be annoying.

Recently I realized that ChatGPT's conversational mode, which is built into the standard app, does pretty much what I want. I turned it on, said "entiendes Espanol?" and we were off. I could play with it when I had a bit of spare time, and while it's not an especially interesting conversational partner, it gets the language flowing.

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/chatgpt-spanish-practice.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/chatgpt-spanish-practice-big.png)

There is a threshold level of fluency necessary for this to work, though: I have enough Spanish that the more I talk to it the more I remember (or newly learn). I also gave it a try with my poorly remembered Chinese, but its responses just washed over me: I'd need to practice a lot elsewhere before I was able to make progress this way. I did try prompting it to speak simply and be a teacher, but it was still beyond what I could handle.

I also tried out Spanish with a couple other models. Gemini's conversation mode was much less... conversational? It kept ending its turns awkwardly early, and often with something unnatural like "it there an aspect of X you have more questions about?" With Claude, I couldn't even get that far: it seemed to only speak and understand English, even after "Settings > Speech language > Spanish."

It is a bit dystopian having conversations with an AI about nothing, but overall I'm ok with it: it's helping me work on my Spanish so I can better communicate, live in the moment, with people who speak it.

  
\[1\] The most stressful version of this was probably when I flew to Ecuador with Julia in 2012. We traveled separately to save money, and when I checked in they were only able to give me my boarding pass as far as Colombia; I'd need to get a boarding pass for the flight to Quito once I got there. The first leg was fine, and when I got to Bogota I went to the gate where my flight was leaving. I was very early, and talked to the gate agent (in English). They told me that they were there for the current flight, but if I waited for the next gate agent they'd be able to print my boarding pass and get me on my flight.

Except when that person turned up they told me that actually the only people who could check me in were the people at the ticket counter, outside security. So I'd need to go out through customs, get my boarding pass, back through security, and then back to the gate, which there definitely wasn't time for. Possibly I could have made more of a fuss at the gate, but instead I went along with this as far as going to the ticket counter, at which point I needed to explain my situation and get on a later flight. It turned out I'd missed this airline's last flight of the day, and also that there was no one available who could speak English, so I ended up trying to explain what had happened in Spanish, and especially how I followed the agent's instructions such that it was not my error that led to my predicament. I was eventually able to convince them to put me on a flight to Quito on a different airline, and arrived about 4hr late. This was especially worrying because (pre-Fi) Julia and I had no international cell service and I had no way to let her know what was going on.

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