Will we learn languages from AI bots soon?

I was talking to someone the other day who is studying to be a language teacher. And my immediate reaction was...

"Are you sure that job is going to be around in the future?"

The person's first reaction was that i was trying to be an ass.. lol

But then i was like... No i'm serious. Thank about it.

Right now AI is evolving quickly and people are building all kinds of new applications on top of the engine that ChatGPT is based on.

So imagine when you have an AI bot that you can just talk to and learn a language. Imagine it looking like this guy for example.

He will correct you every time you say something wrong.

Correct your pronunciation.

Adjust to your style & speed of learning.

And you can study for as long as you want each day, and it would be able to tell you with fairly decent precision when you will be fluent.

Let me relate this to my experience learning languages

Over the course of my 45 years in addition to my native English I have studied:

• Japanese: lived in Japan 2 years back in 2001-3 and was advanced conversational
• Spanish: learned during my MBA in Barcelona in 2003-5 and was advanced conversational
• French: learned during 6-month mba exchange in Paris in 2004 and was basic conversational
• Chinese: learned during 3-months internship in Shanghai back in 2003 and never got to conversational
• Russian: learned and became fluent during ~8 year period that i lived in Russia and Ukraine

And so i have a fair bit of experience learning languages…. And am proud to say that as an adult i took three different 2nd languages (Japanese, Spanish and Russian) to a pretty advanced level.

And the challenges were always the same:

• it is easier to learn with a person than just out of textbooks
• learning with a person is expensive and more difficult scheduling-wise
• the quality of your learning depends on the quality of the teacher, which is hard to know in advance
• The definition of ‘fluency’ is very unclear and less clear when you will get there. Do i need to put in another 2 months of work or 6 months?
• The amount of time you study can be capped by the teacher’s availability

Almost all of these challenges are solvable with a very good AI bot

The language bot replaces what a teacher would have done, but it is tireless and always available.

Once AI bots get to this level do i think that a whole sleuth of language-learning related tech companies will be under massive threat and eventually die off if they do not evolve? YES.

So should these language tech companies be thinking about this now?

Well, seeing how fast AI is moving right now.. i'd go as far to say that if you're a language tech company not thinking about this... then you risk being the Blockbuster to the future Netflix.