Google is taking on Duolingo with a fresh Google Search feature designed to help individuals enhance their English speaking skills. This new feature, set to roll out in the next few days for Search on Android devices in Argentina, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Venezuela, with plans to expand to more countries and languages in the future, offers interactive speaking practice for language learners who are translating to or from English. According to Google’s blog post by Christian Plagemann, Google Research director, and Katya Cox, product manager, Google Search is already a valuable tool for language learners by providing translations, definitions, and other resources to improve vocabulary. Now, Android users translating to or from English can enjoy a new English speaking practice experience with personalized feedback.
In these practice sessions, users receive prompts and are encouraged to respond using specific vocabulary words. Each practice session lasts between 3 to 5 minutes, and Search provides personalized feedback, along with the option to receive daily reminders for continued practice and advancement to more challenging levels.
The personalization aspect of this feature includes semantic feedback, which assesses the relevance and comprehensibility of responses to specific questions, grammar improvement suggestions, and a range of example answers with varying levels of complexity. Learners can also tap on unfamiliar words to see context-aware translations during their practice sessions.
Google emphasizes that this tool is meant to complement other learning resources, such as personal tutoring, mobile apps, and classes. It’s designed to assist learners on their language journey and required significant AI and machine learning engineering efforts to develop various models, such as Deep Aligner for word connections and grammar correction models for accented speech transcription.
The creation of this language tutoring experience involved input from linguists, teachers, ESL/EFL experts, and other language learning partners. Google has plans to broaden this program further by collaborating with additional partners.
While Google’s motivation behind this language learning tool isn’t explicitly stated in the blog post, it’s uncertain whether it aims to challenge established language learning apps like Duolingo, Memrise, and Babbel. Google has ventured into language learning and education tools before, so the purpose of this endeavor remains somewhat ambiguous. However, the company is showing a clear commitment to expanding this feature and assessing its popularity in the market.
