What is Animated Agents

This chapter describes the design of a speech interactive CALL program and its evaluation with end users. The program, SPELL (Spoken Electronic Language Learning), combines speech recognition technology, embodied animated agents and virtual worlds in creating an environment in which learners can converse with virtual characters in the target language in real-time. Empirical results are presented from an experiment which evaluated user satisfaction of using the program and interacting with the characters, and speech recognition accuracy. The results detail the limitations of the speech recogniser in this context. However, data on user satisfaction clearly show that the system was perceived by language learners as being both useful and enjoyable.