DuoBook: Generate bilingual stories to learn any language
62 comments
·May 4, 2025kriro
rzz3
I also jumped out of the funnel and had this “I got tricked” feeling after selecting the story parameters. I’m someone who would use this, too. But I’m not giving you my personal information unless I can see what it does.
askl
You don't have to confirm your email address there. Just enter something random. That's usually what I try on sites like this, when it doesn't work just close the tab and move on.
celltalk
I know it’s a friction, but we were (maybe still are) a bit paranoid of abuse or bot attacks, as we are using a paid api to roll this thing. One suggestion others gave was to show stories generated by other users, I think that might work. What do you think?
InsideOutSanta
Why not offer a whole library of stories generated by other users that have been reviewed by a human and deemed good?
I'm the target audience for this app, but I don't really want to generate my own stories; I want to read. Generating stories is just additional work for me, and I don't know how good the story is before I generate and read it. If I had access to a library of human-reviewed stories, I'd just read those, knowing that they are at least okay. You wouldn't even have to review them yourself; you could have a system for users to rate stories.
You're selling this as an AI product, but I don't care about AI. I care about learning a new language by reading stories.
ErigmolCt
Exactly this. Most language learners aren't itching to become story generators - we just want quality, engaging content that helps us practice
celltalk
We have included the latest stories generated by the community, so there is more content to discover on the app. We can have a look at the voting & sharing features etc. later.
onkkos
That is really a good idea!
Then subscribers could like/upvote Stories when they like them.
carstenhag
Have beginner and intermediate examples (1 page) available. Also helps show what the real UI looks like. Because the current tiny demo UI is probably not the real one, not sure?
Also, pricing is not mentioned anywhere on the start page or before signup
yuvadam
Provide a free experience that doesn't hit any paid APIs and doesn't require any registration or friction, you'll convert much better.
j45
Conversion can mean paying customers, not just free users.
I could see using this on a mobile/tablet app.
oniony
Just have the beginner puppy book available in all languages (or major ones).
random42
1. Generate a story.
2. Make it available for all (major) languages.
3. Profit!
Also, integrate with captcha + rate limit to prevent abuse. Authentication alone is not strong enough deterrent to a motivated adversary.
j45
- Stories generated by other users would be interesting.
- You could look at running a locally hosted model. There are some good story writing ones, albeit unsure for languages.
- Help visitors generate example stories for language pairs on your website ... if a language pair already has one, maybe show a pre-existing one.
.. if it's a new language pair being tested, inform the user it may be shared with others to let them see how the system works?
ErigmolCt
Yeah, same here. I was intrigued but bounced the moment it asked for sign-up without showing anything
outside1234
Yes, consider something like letting the user keep track of "minutes reading" or "word points" after generating a story as the point where you log them in.
There has to be user value to login or nobody will do it.
celltalk
There is a progress and practice page for users, maybe we should emphasize this better in the main page?
altern8
[dead]
jasonpeacock
Related is Prismatext, which intermixes the new language into the text of a book in your native language, so you get in-place, contextual learning of the new language:
vunderba
I built something like this for my own personal language studies about a decade ago called "Kindle Swap". You fed it an ebook in ePub/MOBI format along with a list of known vocabulary and it would sprinkle them into the book so you could read it on your Kindle at your leisure later.
DHolzer
consider telling us upfront about the login requirement and/or have the three demo stories prepared in all combinations, saves you money too.
999900000999
This is neat.
But, please focus on 3 or 4 languages. Do those well.
Asian languages ( apparently Cantonese isn’t on the list ) are very hard to machine translate.
As is this is just Chat GPT + AWS Translate + AWS Text To Speech. Along with Firebase for user management and a very nice UX front end.
To turn this into a product I’d select maybe 3 languages, French , Spanish, German and hire advisors for all 3. Work on creating a few stories edited by your advisors and add basic gamification/quizzes.
I like the idea though
shadowvoxing
Disagree. I'm learning Polish -not the most popular of languages- and I think this idea is fantastic and much appreciated.
celltalk
Thank you both. Great that you like it! :)
celltalk
My best friend and I had been trying to learn Dutch for a while. About a month ago, we picked up some Donald Duck books in Dutch, thinking they'd be fun and simple to start with. But soon enough, we found ourselves constantly switching between the book and our phones, struggling to follow the story—definitely not the immersive experience we had hoped for...
That’s when I remembered those books with one language on one page and the translation on the opposite page. Inspired by that concept, I thought, why not use AI to create something similar, but even more interactive?
So, we built DuoBook.
Here's how it works:
1) Start writing your story in your language.
2) Select the language you want to learn.
3) AI helps complete the story, side-by-side with your native language.
It’s still early days, and it might not be perfect, but it's genuinely helping us—and we hope it helps you too!
Check it out: duobook.co
yurishimo
Hey! I'm also learning Dutch and trying it out. A couple of things I discovered. For reference, I'm a native English speaker and speak Dutch at a B2~ level but my reading vocabulary is probably closer to B1.
The "long" story is not that long. I was expecting something closer to 1000 words or more. Using your Donald Duck example, I doubt the long story was more than 4 or 5 comic book pages. I started with the magic mushroom example, intermediate difficulty, and long length.
I also generated another story using the "lost puppy" prompt, but this time advanced difficulty and long. The difficulty was ramped up which I appreciate, but the length was even shorter than before!
The speech synthesis is garbage, but I'm sure you already know that. For a free service (for now), I understand why some limitations are in place, but it doesn't look good for your product unless you're targeting beginners. I'm not sure what you're offering is useful to anyone above that level. 3 stories per day for me is about 10-15 minutes on advanced (including the generation waiting time).
I wish you luck with the project! Imo, your time is best spent now optimizing your spend so you can provide higher quality audio to go alongside the text. I'm sure you will have plenty of content generated, but surfacing that to users without it feeling icky might also be a challenge.
WalterGR
> That’s when I remembered those books with one language on one page and the translation on the opposite page.
One term for this is "Parallel Text" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_text).
Cool idea! I've been thinking about learning German - I'll have to give this a try.
celltalk
Please do! Let us know :)
gus_massa
Do you have a few samples that can be read without registering?
Does it highlight the matching words?
celltalk
If you go down on the main page, you will see an example of Spanish to English.
And, we don’t have language alignment yet. Still, it highlights some of the “hard” words.
freddie_mercury
You'll probably want to show examples in all the languages you target. I wanted to see how good the Vietnamese is for my kids but signing up (especially on mobile) just to see if the tool is even useful is enough friction that I didn't bother.
vunderba
Nice job. I'd recommend "publishing" some bilingual books that have already been made on the platform as a better pattern for discovery since content creation requires signing up.
celltalk
Thank you! That’s a great suggestion maybe we can show the latest generated stories by other users.
PaulRobinson
That just leads to abuse. Think about it.
Go get something out of Project Gutenberg that is popular, and not too long.
Translate it into 3-4 major languages. Give those away for free.
Even better, test your translations against actual public domain translations if they exist, and be transparent about WER for each language.
If you want this to be a business, you’re going to have to do some serious business-like things.
roel_v
I think, judging from your responses in this thread, that you're focusing too much on the 'generating stories' part. IMO that's the least attractive/useful part of your offering. The 'read something in two languages' is what use useful to your users. I made something not quite like your app but related: a tool to translate (epub) ebooks into two-column ebooks with a translated version on one side, so you're not constantly googling/chatgpting things. What you have has the potential for more interactivity though (like, my dual language ebooks can't highlight words to match from left to right or vice versa). I would love your tool if it wasn't for the 'the content is AI generated' part. I'm not looking to add more AI slop into my life, but that doesn't mean I'm against it for actually useful purposes, like translations/language learning.
wingerlang
Is this a real origin story or a fake one? (Obviously written by AI)
celltalk
Hahaha I know it sounds fake but it is actually true.
atoav
At least with German Donald Duck the language used there is.. special in a good way. The early translator Erika Fuchs devised a whole new variant of German that:
- uses words and phrases that are either of rare historic origin or completely made up new ones
- verb forms so uncommon that verb form she used frequently (the Infliktiv) has a second inofficial name: the Erikativ
- she frequently borrowed from the biggest writers and poets in the German language in her translations
- for the younger figures there is an entirely made up youth slang that is both appealing and incredibly entertaining to read
The english originals are utterly boring to read in comparison. Her work has a literaric and entertainer quality of the kind that made generations realize there is no real border between serious high brow literature and comics.
benatkin
At first I had trouble coming up with an idea for a story. I think it could use more examples. I chose "Ayn Rand gets added to Mt Rushmore" and it made a nice story about it. The next one I might try is "Dingoes permitted as pets around the world". Basically anything you can imagine. I like the vocabulary quiz. I did Spanish and it had a new word and a couple that I'm fuzzy on, and that was useful practice.
Edit: Year of Linux on the Desktop is another.
Edit 2: For Year of Linux on the Desktop it did 2024 as that year. Might want to add the current date to the prompt and say that to have stuff imagined in the future be after that. Another thought is to have the LLM suggest a story prompt for you.
celltalk
Thank you for also trying the practice mode! Super useful feedback. I will add them to the TO-DO list.
benatkin
Another thing that isn't a show-stopper but is less than ideal, is that one of the vocabulary word pairs from the dingo story I did was dingo/dingo. For some things it's worthwhile to point out that they're spelled the same, like hotel/hotel, but dingo is kind of obvious. I just looked it up and it comes from indigenous language, though it's changed a bit.
hliyan
Tried this with my native language. Many errors. Probably because the language is only spoken by 20 million people (Sinhala). Suggestion: ability to highlight one word and have its translation highlighted. Could catch errors like the one I encountered: "A robot lives alone on Mars" got translated to "A robot was born alone on Mars"
celltalk
Sorry to hear that. Do you think we should exclude it then? I think highlighting the word is second most requested feature so far. Thank you for the feedback!
j45
Highlighting the word is extremely cool. Using these examples as feedback into the system ("how did the translation do?"), and letting users provide feedback that you can improve your model on with this feedback loop would be ideal.
hs586
I wanted to work on a similar idea recently for my personal use, but I wanted to use books and stories that already have the texts in the two languages that I am interested in (e.g. Harry Potter).
So you pass in two texts and get back some form of aligned text. If you have some knowledge of the language you are trying to learn and are ok without a perfect sentence-to-sentence alignment, then this would work.
My motivation is to improve my wife's and my knowledge of each other's languages while reading books to our daughter.
For a moment I got excited that someone else had already built it :)
dustincoates
Great stuff, congrats!
A couple of suggestions: - I'm learning Hebrew and I'm at the beginner stage, so it would be good to have niqqud. Even with the STT, it's helpful at this stage. - For the STT, every time I tried it, it just said something that sounded like "Dodd."
dinkblam
very nice but:
1.) a "long" story is still only like 20 sentences 2.) a real translation for each sentence is nice but often you are still left wondering what each word means. a "word by word" literal translation would be more useful either as an option or additionally. or the ability to click on any word and see the translation (bonus points for the declinations / conjugations too)
hejsansvejsan
Interesting bug: when pressing the text-to-speech button to hear my Swedish story read out loud, what I get is a pretty good rendition of the text read as if it were French.
celltalk
Thank you! We will have a look at it, but TTS right now is browser based. I think it would be cool to have better TTS (OpenAI or Google) for a new paid tier.
ErigmolCt
Kinda curious how good the AI translations are. If it's just straight-up machine translation, that might get rough fast depending on the language pair
ordzo
I tried it on Icelandic and the grammar was horrible.
I'd suggest an extra tier where you can generate a very tiny story without signup to try it first.
As is, I jumped out of the funnel already.