Apparently, we here at Speech Tech are not the only ones obsessed with Robots; the New York Times has been doing a series of articles focused on technology that has included a lot of robots: dancing robots, talking robot heads, teaching robots and more. One thing at a time though, since today we’re going to focus on teaching robots. Thanks NYT, we knew we weren’t alone.
According to the article, robots are used to teach everything from basic social behavior to languages. Most of these robots fall into the less creepy looking, i.e. not rubberized valley ala uncanny humanoid. In fact, it does seem that more often now robots are falling into a kind of Wall-e category: robots that are designed to clearly be recognized as Robots, but still have some kind of “face” and/or possess the ability to present an expression. In other words, they’re kind of cute.
My favorite of the new robots the NYT reported on was the Engkey, which is currently used to teach South Korean kids English. Engkey, is a squat robot that looks a little like a futuristic Russian nesting doll.
Part of the reason EngKey has come into use is because there is a dearth of native English-Speaking teachers available. As a former teacher (who was actually recruited by Korea to teach English but couldn’t relocate), I was especially interested in the the idea of robots being used to teach students, especially because its so hard sometimes to get student attention, and I imagine a robot would get most people’s attention, at least at first. It certainly beats the lame math “games” I played in the eighties which were presented on “toy” robots or other tech systems, meant to make math fun. Yeah right.
Anyhow, the Engkey is speech-enabled, so it can respond to students, telling them if their accent needs work or if they spoke a phrase correctly or not. It can also spin around and give students a high five while showing images of stars on its screen.
Of course people are worried that robots won’t be able to teach students as well as real teachers, though robots certainly won’t run out of patience, form unions or demand to be paid more. At least, not yet.
Photo credit: Choe Sang-Hun, New York Times
