We believe that AI and education go great together, and are incredibly excited to announce our “AskAI” feature. We leverage ChatGPT to help your child learn Chinese more effectively with less frustration, via highly-personalised, teacher-like feedback.

If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT, check out our previous article. To summarize, ChatGPT is a next-generation AI that could change all aspects of our lives, especially education.

THE PROBLEM

One of the most common problems we hear from parents is when their kids make mistakes, traditional methods of simply showing the correct answer without further explanation doesn’t help. Consider the following question:

If a child struggles with the above question because he or she didn’t know what is “蜜蜂” (bees), merely showing the correct answer has limited use. If he is tested a different question containing the word “蜜蜂”, he would likely still get it wrong since he doesn’t know that it refers to “bees”.

Blindly memorising without understanding is frustrating and doesn’t actually help a child learn, yet is the default for assessment books and almost all Chinese learning apps.

Contrast this with a real-life teacher

Compare this to a real-teacher – a teacher would help a child a) read and understand every word in the question, b) comprehend the holistic meaning of the sentence, and c) select the answer that fits the sentence context. By going through this three step process, a teacher helps a child actually overcome learning gaps and builds confidence in the language.

Just one problem – personsalised feedback from a human teacher is ideal, but what if your child is struggling with a question at 8pm on a Tuesday night with no teacher in sight?

The obvious answer is parents, but we often aren’t the best people to help. Many parents have told me that their language skills aren’t good enough to help their kids with Chinese. Others say they get easily frustrated/impatient with their kids when teaching and would prefer to avoid it.

INTRODUCING ASKAI

With AskAI, parents no longer have to worry!

AskAI combines VocabKing’s proprietary technology with ChatGPT to provide personalised, teacher-like feedback on mistakes. When a child gets a question wrong, AskAI analyzes the error and provides targeted feedback that explains why the answer is incorrect. Explanations are also purposely provided in English to help students understand faster (vs providing explanations in Chinese that the majority of students will ignore).

See below for a quick clip on how AskAI helps a child with the “bees” question.

Just like a human teacher, ChatGPT helps identify the specific areas where a child may have made mistakes, such as misreading a word, confusing similar words, or misunderstanding the sentence structure. This allows a child to understand the reasons behind the error and learn from it without feeling frustrated, all without requiring parents to constantly step in.

AskAI is currently available for over thousands of 组词成句, 辨字 and 词语选择 questions in our Pet Battle, and see the picture below on how to use it. We will be adding support for other question categories like 完成句子, 连词, 词语解释 in the coming weeks.

Why do we need AskAI for Chinese?

Consider the following Math question, except with just two words (“same”, “mass”) blanked out.

Helen and Ivan had the **** number of coins. Each of them had a mix of twenty-cent coins and fifty-cent coins. Helen had 64 twenty-cent coins and Ivan had 104 twenty-cent coins. The total **** of Helen’s coins was 1.134 kg. If a fifty-cent coin is 2.7g heavier than a twenty-cent coin, what is the **** of Ivan’s coins in kilograms?

Imagine the frustration of trying to solve it when you can’t fully comprehend the question. And if I showed you the answer, but didn’t decipher what “***” meant, you would understandably get frustrated – since that was the main reason you didn’t understand the question in the first place. That’s the key reason why so many kids get frustrated and demoralised when doing Chinese.

VocabKing is hard at work to bridge this frustration gap. Any time a child gets a question wrong, he or she is able to click on any word to instantly see its meaning; and with ChatGPT integration, he will be able to get human-like feedback and empower him to learn from mistakes and progress at his own pace.

And of course each time your child answers, our AI engine is tracking your child’s progress to tailor a more effective learning plan for faster improvement.

Are humans evaluating the explanations?

Yes! We know that AI will make mistakes (just like humans), and we have humans on the backend evaluating the explanations to ensure that they make sense.

Having said that, there are tens of thousands of explanations to go through, and if you notice a mistake in any explanation, you can report it by clicking on the “Poor Explanation” button, which will allow our team to improve the explanation and train the model to become more accurate.

A NEW WAY TO IMPROVE YOUR CHILD’S LEARNING

The vast majority of students hate revising Chinese, yet over the last 9 months, students have voluntarily answered over 500k Chinese questions on VocabKing! 

We believe this shows that as long as you make learning engaging and personalised, and help students overcome frustration at not understanding their mistakes, any child can grow to love and learn Chinese.

At the same time, we believe AI and ChatGPT are game-changers for education. There is no replacement for a human teacher, but most students do not have 24/7 access to a tutor when they are struggling with a question. AI allows us to provide personalised and human-like assistance to ensure students aren’t frustrated by mistakes and are instead motivated to keep going!

Do you want your child to improve at Chinese?

Try out the 7-day free trial of VocabKing, the AI learning platform that unlocks your child’s hidden potential in Chinese through games and stories. 80% of students who practise regularly improve within 2 weeks, so whatsapp us for more information.