Hana: An Open-Domain Chatbot Application for Language Learning

Learning a new language can be very challenging. One significant aspect of learning a language is learning how to have fluent verbal and written conversations with other people in that language. However, it can be difficult to find other people available with whom to practice conversations. Additionally, total beginners may feel uncomfortable and self-conscious when speaking the language with others. In this paper, I present Hana, a chatbot application powered by deep learning for practicing open-domain verbal and written conversations in a variety of different languages. Hana uses a pre-trained medium-sized instance of Microsoft's DialoGPT in order to generate English responses to user input translated into English. Google Cloud Platform's Translation API is used to handle translation to and from the language selected by the user. The chatbot is presented in the form of a browser-based web application, allowing users to interact with the chatbot in both a verbal or text-based manner. Overall, the chatbot is capable of having interesting open-domain conversations with the user in languages supported by the Google Cloud Translation API, but response generation can be delayed by several seconds, and the conversations and their translations do not necessarily take into account linguistic and cultural nuances associated with a given language.