Microsoft built an AI-powered iOS app to help you learn Chinese

The idea here is to provide users with a way to practice the Chinese language in the absence of real-life communicative partners. "You think you know Chinese, but if you meet a Chinese person and you want to speak Chinese, there is no way you can do it if you have not practiced," said Microsoft's Yan Xia in a blog post. There's no word on plans to expand to other languages, but it's not hard to see such an app helping you learn to converse in different tongues, too. The app uses various AI tools like deep neural networks that are able to figure out what you're trying to say and then evaluate your pronunciation. The AI has been trained on data from native Chinese speakers as well as Microsoft's text-to-speech technology.