Σχεδίαση και ανάπτυξη ενός εικονικού περιβάλλοντος διαλογικής αλληλεπίδρασης για εκμάθηση των ελληνικών

Abstract

On the one hand, in recent years virtual reality applications seem to be gaining ground in various areas of our everyday life. One of these areas is education, and in particular the area of language learning. In fact, the field of "virtual reality assisted language learning" applications is already counting some first steps and seems to be attracting more and more interest with the most popular of these applications having several thousand users. On the other hand, we are interested in interactive assistants or chatbots, which are intelligent systems that can develop conversations in natural language and in real time. From businesses to public services, from online customer service platforms to automated telephone support, interactive assistants can be found in many human-computer communication applications. Similarly, chatbots have also been used by some language learning applications. In this diploma thesis, after a theoretical study of the above concepts and an overview of applications related to language learning, a baseline for an state-of-the-art virtual reality language learning application with the presence of interactive assistants was defined. Subsequently, such an application was designed, a prototype version of it was developed and after an evaluation process future extensions were proposed. Using the application, the user will be able to practice Greek language by communicating with human characters in the context of realistic scenarios inspired by everyday life. To serve this purpose, in addition to virtual reality and interactive assistants, other innovative technologies, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech synthesis (TTS), have been employed and combined.