A basic study on developing CAI system by voice communication agent

The voice is the natural communication medium between humans, and so a software agent that can communicate conversationally with a user, in Japanese, is applied for a prototype CAI (computer-assisted instruction) system. The developed agent-based CAI system is an instructional system where the agent teaches the students by speech output, while showing graphs, figures, tables, pictures and text on the display, and asking questions as to whether the students have understood the given contents or not. A student can ask questions at any time during the lesson, even by interrupting the lecture of the agent. The subject of the CAI system is knowledge about nuclear power generation. A trial and an evaluation of the developed CAI system was made by giving questionnaires to several students, and it was found that teaching by the voice-communicating agent was more friendly than by a conventional text-based one, but there remained some problems in the conversation. Based on this experience, a more improved scheme for the agent interface is discussed in this paper