Speaker: Staffan Larsson, University of Gothenburg
Title: Educational dialogue applications: the Reading Buddy and the Language Buddy
Abstract:
Talkamatic (https://talkamatic.se) is a spinoff company from the dialogue group at FLoV/CLASP specializing in conversational AI. In recent years we have focused on EdTech, and specifically on educational dialogue applications. In this talk, we present two applications of this work: the Reading Buddy (Sw. “Läskompis”) and the Language Buddy (Sw. “Språkkompis”). In the presentation, we talk about the technology behind “Språkkompis” and “Läskompis”, but also about the pedagogical background and about the iterative development process.
Together with pedagogy researcher Josefine Karlsson from Örebro University, Talkamatic has developed a "digital reading buddy" that helps children in primary and middle school to practice reading comprehension. The reading buddy has a conversation with the student and asks different kinds of questions about a text, both "right or wrong" questions and more open questions. The reading buddy can be made available via apps or via the web, and has been tested by teachers and students at several schools ahead of an upcoming commercial launch.
We also discuss the Language Buddy, developed together with SFI teachers, which enables students in SFI (Swedish for immigrants) to practice conversational skills, speech comprehension, vocabulary, pronunciation and more in everyday and professional activities. The Language Buddy offers multimodal and multilingual support to support the learning process. The Language Buddy is currently being tested and used in SFI schools in Swedish municipalities (primarily in Skåne).