Amazon's Alexa is now widely available and shows interesting potential as a platform for hosting CALL games aimed at children. In this paper, we describe an initial informal experiment where we created some simple CALL games and made them available to a few child testers. We report the children's and parents' reactions. Our overall conclusion is that, although Alexa has many positive features, there are still fundamental platform issues in the current version that make it very difficult to build compelling CALL games for children. The games used will soon be freely available for download on the Alexa store.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1907.13214,
title = {Alexa as a CALL platform for children: Where do we start?},
author = {Nikos Tsourakis and Manny Rayner and Hanieh Habibi and Pierre-Emmanuel Gallais and Cathy Chua and Matt Butterweck},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.13214},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
4 pages. Based on talk given at enetCollect WG3 & WG5 Meeting, Leiden, Holland, 2018