Language Learning: Pingo AI

Only rating it this high so people can see it. This app actually seems very useful and a good use of AI. However, you can only do one lesson with this app which I think is a major downside. A lot of people want to learn languages right now either because they’re traveling or they’re going to school somewhere and it’s very difficult and nearly impossible to do that when everything has a paywall in order for you to learn. if I have any recommendations for this app, I’d say do one lesson than a day similar TUIEDA. And then, if the person wants to practice more during that day, they can pay premium. Another nice thing would be to allow the user to constantly practice the vocal words and not just allow them to practice once and then remove everything from saved vocab. It kind of defeats the purpose of having saved vocab if you’re just gonna get rid of it. Once Steve practiced it.

Ultimately, this is a good idea, but a huge letdown in terms of the actual user experience and functionality. The conversational AI that I expected is not so conversational after all. The app does a good job of setting up scenarios and having you walk-through and build upon very basic sentences as you go. However, there’s a major breakdown and miss when it comes to creating conversational AI where you can go back-and-forth or debate points. For example, I was going through a lesson that included a mock scenario where I am a Chef and I needed to propose a new menu idea to my boss. Despite Pingo giving me the topic, it suggested that I needed to ask for more “engineers“. It was then difficult to reason with Pingo about how a real conversation like this would go so that in the theory, I’d be ready for a conversation like this in real life. Instead, I had a conversation that was half baked and a little nonsensical, and all Pingo did was provide me with basic grammar rules that I should adhere to when proposing an argument. It would be helpful in this scenario if you could go back-and-forth with the AI chat bot in the same way that you could with a ChatGPT or Copilot. If I role-play with the spoken, ChatGPT feature, it will often suggest things or push back on things if instructed. I would think for a dedicated voice chat bot feature in a language learning app, it would be able to take on different example personas in order to simulate real conversation, which is what most people are looking for when they’re learning languages rather than the traditional “flashcards” type app.

I reeeeeaaaally liked this app! I enjoyed being able to pick the conversation and get practice talking about things that I would actually want to talk about in real conversations that are very niche and not taught quickly in other language apps… however, I paid for 1 month wanting to give it a try but just didn’t end up using it as much as I wanted to. I didn’t mind paying for that first month as a trial but then I got charged for a second month and I feel silly but I really couldn’t find where to cancel my subscription. (I realize now that you cancel within the App Store but it really irked me that you couldn’t easily find details on how to cancel your subscription in the actual app) This may be common knowledge to other people who have subscriptions but I was surprised on the lack of info in-app. So, I sent an email to their support email last month regarding my cancellation and I still have yet to get a reply. I just got charged for the third month, so my complaint is that I couldn’t easily find out how to cancel my subscription and didn’t receive any help regarding it. Otherwise, I really truly liked the app 🙃