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On the final day of my visit to Japan, I’m alone and floating in some skyscraper’s rooftop hot springs, praying no one joins me. For the last few months, I’ve been using ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode as an AI language tutor, part of a test to judge generative AI’s potential as both a learning tool and a travel companion. The excessive talking to both strangers and a chatbot on my phone was illuminating as well as exhausting. I’m ready to shut my yapper for a minute and enjoy the silence.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT late in 2022, it set off a firestorm of generative AI competition and public interest. Over two years later, many people are still unsure whether it can be useful in their daily lives outside of work.
A video from OpenAI in May of 2024 showing two researchers chatting back and forth, one in English and the other in Spanish, with ChatGPT acting as a low-latency interpreter, stuck in my memory. I wondered how practical the Advanced Voice Mode could be for learning how to speak bits of a new language and whether it’s a worthwhile app for travelers.
To better understand how AI voice tools might transform the future of language learning, I spent a month practicing Japanese with the ChatGPT smartphone app before traveling to Tokyo for the first time. Outside of watching some anime, I had zero working knowledge of the language. During conversation sessions with the Advanced Voice Mode that usually lasted around 30 minutes, I often approached it as my synthetic, over-the-phone language tutor, practicing basic travel phrases for navigating transportation, restaurants, and retail shops.
On a previous trip, I’d used Duolingo, a smartphone app with language-learning quizzes and games, to brush up on my Spanish. I was curious how ChatGPT would compare. I often test new AI tools to understand their benefits and limitations, and I was eager to see if this approach to language learning could be the killer feature that makes these tools more appealing to more people.
Me and My AI Language Tutor
Jackie Shannon, an OpenAI product lead for multimodal AI and ChatGPT, claims to use the chatbot to practice Spanish vocabulary words as she’s driving to the office. She suggests beginners like me start by using it to learn phrases first—more knowledgeable learners can immediately try free-flowing dialogs with the AI tool. “I think they should dive straight into conversation,” she says. “Like, ‘Help me have a conversation about the news on X.’ Or, ‘Help me practice ordering dinner.’”
So I worked on useful travel phrases with ChatGPT and acting out roleplaying scenarios, like pretending to order food and making small talk at an izakaya restaurant. Nothing really stuck during the first two weeks, and I began to get nervous, but around week three I started to gain a loose grip on a few key Japanese phrases for travelers, and I felt noticeably less anxious about the impending interactions in another language.
ChatGPT is not necessarily designed with language acquisition in mind. “This is a tool that has a number of different use cases, and it hasn’t been optimized for language learning or translation yet,” says Shannon. The generalized nature of the chatbot’s default settings can lead to a frustrating blandness of interactions at first, but after a few interactions ChatGPT’s memory feature caught on fairly quickly that I was planning for a Japan trip and wanted speaking practice.
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