Slater - your virtual foreign language friend

Conversational, context-aware, and multi-modal chatbot specialized in carrying basic conversations in foreign languages.

Submission to the Cloudflare AI Challenge.

Please check out the demo.

Problem and pain points

I want to learn Mandarin, but I don't have a Mandarin-speaking friend to practice with. I'm also not confident enough with my foreign language skills to speak with a Mandarin-speaking person online.

Duolingo doesn't teach me how to write or speak the things I want to express. For example, I want to say This is my favorite coffee shop. I know how to construct the sentence, but I don't know the Mandarin word for favorite. So, I end up saying - Zhe tiao wo de favorite kafei guan.

Google Translate lacks certain language nuances. It also doesn't keep track of the things I looked up.

Keeping notes of the words I learn takes effort - I have to write down the English word, hanzi, pinyin, and how it is used in a sentence.

Develop or run locally

Clone the project

git clone https://github.com/seanvelasco/slater

Install dependencies

npm install

Populate .env with your API keys

API=YOUR_API_KEY

Run the program

npm run dev

Stack

Frontend

• Solid.js

Backend

• Cloudflare Workers

Models

• Meta Llama 2 (conversations)
• Meta M2M-100 1.2B (translations)
• OpenAI Whisper (speech-to-text)

APIs

• Google Text-to-Speech

Notes from the author

This is my first time building an LLM app. Please let me know if there are things I should fix or improve - sean@sean.app. I appreciate all feedback!