Professor Merryman

Chatbots in Second Life 2

If a Japanese student is going to stand a chance walking up to a foreigner and starting a conversation, they should at least be able to ask 5-10 questions with the utmost confidence that what they are saying is correct. The only way to do that is to practice asking the same questions many times. But how can they do that when the only chance they have to ask a foreigner even one question happens on a very rare occasion? Introducing chatbots.

Chatbots aren’t new, but the fact they have been around for almost 10 years, and haven’t been exploited to their full potential, baffles me. Sites like Oddcast and Sitepal have been putting faces to them for years, but we still haven’t figured out how to make them mainstream. Don’t you think our students would love to sit in class with their cell phones practicing English?

OK. Maybe that sounds a little far fetched, but is it? Imagine if we could involve them in conversations with virtual friends who become their partners for a semester. The students could train them to say how to respond to every question posed to them. How fun would that be? Yes, of course that would be a very advanced exercise, but in the simplest form it would mean we could at least get students to communicate in the classroom in a way that is much more interactive than the 3 minutes they have with a native speaker.

Here is a video I recorded today of a chatbot I made. I’m going to experiment with it to see how the students take to using it. It’s also available through the web so those without Second Life can also access it.