Today, humanity is confidently entering a new era of civilisation – the era of artificial intelligence. "No matter what the changing landscape, whoever first demonstrates persistence, perseverance, and achieves concrete results will emerge ahead," noted President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev.

Amid rapid technological progress, education requires modernisation. This is especially true for learning foreign languages, as their importance and demand have increased dramatically in recent years.

It is clear that the use of artificial intelligence in this area is becoming increasingly relevant. For example, Google released the game Semantris, which helps learners learn English. In it, users compete against artificial intelligence in identifying and creating associations for words.

In this article, we would like to define the role of artificial intelligence in learning foreign languages: how significant is it, and whether AI can replace humans in language teaching.

Artificial intelligence itself is currently undergoing rapid development. AI systems can now generate text, audio, and images with relatively high quality. For the purposes of this article, it is important to know how well the system understands natural languages.

There is no definitive answer to this question yet. The aforementioned Semantris uses a fully trainable end-to-end algorithm, which is typically used to work with various natural languages. That is, the neural network independently builds models for working with lexemes. Initially, the neural network was trained using examples from natural languages, where each sentence, phrase, or word was pre-programmed with a translation, meaning, or other semantic connection, such as an implication or a question-answer pair. However, despite such significant advances, artificial intelligence's skills in constructing meaningful dialogue are still far from those of humans. Although artificial intelligence can grasp the meaning of simple linguistic structures and even respond to them, it is limited by the literal nature of its own interpretation of questions. A computer may know the definition of words, but it does not understand their meaning in a broader context.

In other words, artificial intelligence lacks the so-called creative approach to words that humans possess. This creative approach to words is one of the most important human skills, enabling them to conduct dialogue accurately and wittily, surprising their interlocutors with a brilliant idea. This leads to the development of orthographic patterns, stylistic codes, and rhetorical algorithms. All this constitutes a "sense of words," making humans creators of their own words, which accumulate knowledge and skills acquired through contact with literary (journalistic) texts.

At the same time, artificial intelligence has a number of advantages over a real interlocutor, one of which is the speed of response. It facilitates virtual brainstorming, or "cyberstorming," based on the spontaneity of interaction and the reverse dynamics of effectively gathering shared ideas, while various delays can occur when interacting with a person.

However, it's important to remember that artificial intelligence and the bots built on it are only capable of supporting simple conversations and engaging in discussions within the framework of carefully selected keywords.

Modern bots, in general, can hardly be called intelligent. Despite the fact that they are created using advanced machine learning and NLP technologies, they are all capable of handling only the highly specialised tasks for which they were created.

That's why, in the app our team is developing, artificial intelligence will not attempt to replace a real conversational partner. The SpeakLab app, which will be available to users in 2022, was created specifically for Language Speaking Clubs. In this app, artificial intelligence will only be used to provide recommendations for our events. Recommendations, in turn, will be based on the user's language level and interests.

To summarise, we can conclude that the role of artificial intelligence in foreign language learning is quite significant today and continues to grow. Artificial intelligence has substantial potential in the field of education and language instruction, however, its current functionality in this area remains limited. Therefore, it is advisable to employ AI only for tasks in which it demonstrates the highest effectiveness, rather than attempting to completely replace traditional teaching methods.