jlabjapanese

My New AI Assistant: Often Stupid, But Incredibly Useful

Added 2025-04-23 18:14:11 +0000 UTC

Since around March, I’ve done a lot of programming on my tools. One big change is that the project now includes an AI assistant that helps with various boring and tedious tasks. Right now, it supports me with sentence mining, provides short video summaries for faster filtering, and helps to deliver more accurate translations with correct context.

All of this makes my work much more convenient and about 50–100% faster — wohoo! For me, that means:

I can find interesting sentences faster. Usually, there’s a list of 50–150 possible sentences for a new word, and the AI can cut this down to the 10 most interesting ones. Often they’re crap, but some are pretty good.
I can add the real context to translations and make them more accurate. In the past, this was super time-consuming, and I was always afraid of someone asking, “Is this the real context?” Now I get that with a few clicks. The quality depends — for example, context brackets [] are often completely wrong — but it is still very helpful.
I can filter out boring and repetitive videos faster.

Overall, I’m still the one in charge — you won’t get AI-generated junk. I review and edit everything and decide what gets used. This is still a lot of manual work, and I absolutely don’t think the full process can be automated anytime soon. In fact, the AI is often surprisingly and incredibly stupid.

Under the hood, I use the OpenAI and Gemini APIs and compose instructions for them directly in my tools. This way, I can add all the context — like a video transcript or the full conversation for a given sentence— with a single click. The results are fed back into the tools. For example, a sentence mining query returns a cropped list of 10 instead of 200 sentences.

Eventually, this will also let me rework the beginner's course to address most of the negative reviews and criticism it gets on AnkiWeb.

One thing that still takes long is adding proper grammar explanations. I recently updated the “yaru” part in the beginner’s course (Tae Kim’s explanation isn’t that accurate, not released yet). That took over two hours and I’m still not fully happy with it ;).