VILTS: The Voice-Interactive Language Training System

Abstract

ECHOS is a voice interactive language training system being developed to foster improvement in French comprehension and speaking skills, incorporating speech recognition and pronunciation evaluation. Speech recognition allows students to navigate through units using oral communication with various types of system feedback. The pronunciation scoring being developed is validated by expert human raters. We will discuss the motivation for the program, the nature of the interdisci plinary effort, and the resulting system architecture. Challenges and trade-offs of designing activities using unscripted material and aspect of speech research as related to this application will be described. Finally, we discuss opportunities to use speech recognition on other platforms.