가상 캐릭터를 활용하여 아동의 구어 대화를 유도하는 대화형 에이전트

Abstract

Childhood verbal communication impacts children’s language skills and has a positive effect as partners use more vocabulary. But reduction in family time, caused by lowered age for private education and so on, has reduced the chance for children to speak with partners who have a proficient language skill. This vacancy was naturally occupied by the media, which has become one of the cornerstones of the growth of kids’ contents. Kids contents are making various attempts to expand the breadth of services. But most contents still focus on unilateral visual information delivery yet, so there is a limit to satisfy the vacancy of conversation partners. Therefore this paper suggests an ECA(Embodied conversational agent) to induce children’s spoken conversation using a virtual character frequently used in kids contents. This system is implemented by the voice bot and agent model produced using an IBM assistant and Unity. As a result of using ECA for 66 children of 5-9 years old, it showed meaningful results in terms of induction of verbal communication.