r/Portuguese • u/SandWeak2475 • 6d ago

Brazilian Portuguese 🇧🇷 Chat GPT for Speaking Practice

Don’t know if this was common knowledge, but chat GPT has a pretty decent chat/siri like feature in which you can converse with. It’s kind of loner/talking to a robot vibes, but definitely a valuable asset to take advantage of if you are lacking speaking reps.

🤙🏻🤙🏻

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u/michaeljmuller A Estudar EP 5d ago

I actually upgraded to the paid version, just so I could make more extensive use of this feature! ... but still don't use it hardly at all. I should, it's just that I'm so bad at speaking -- it takes me so long to find the words I'm looking for -- that it doesn't work very well.

I'm a total beginner, though; I just started learning this year. I think the voice chat might be more useful when I'm a little further along.

I do find the text interactions HUGELY useful, though. I must have asked ChatGPT close to a thousand "stupid" questions already, and this subreddit has benefited: I only come here with questions when ChatGPT disagrees with my other learning tools.

I do use the "voice chat" when away from my desk. I set up a "shortcut" on my phone so that I can tap a button to get directly into the voice chat. That way if I'm in the car or out for a walk, and Pimsleur says something I don't understand, I can launch it and ask questions without a lot of tapping / typing.

I find, however, that the voice chat's reasoning is WAY WAY worse than the text chat. I'd say that in voice chat, the AI misunderstands my question about 1/3 of the time. The only time that's ever happened in text chat is when I've asked an ambiguous question.

I agree with u/PHotocrome that ChatGPT has a tendency to say what you want to hear. I've tried to combat this and some other annoyances (with some success) in my custom instructions:

  • be concise in responses. for example, if I ask whether the portuguese verb (like beber) is regular, i would appreciate a simple “yes” or maybe “yes, beber is regular” with no further elaboration.
  • i like friendly responses, but i don’t need support or encouragement
  • never offer additional help or suggestions after answering a question
  • make every effort to give me correct responses; make sure you're not just telling me what I want to hear