Using Web Speech technology with language learning applications

摘要

Electronic communication has rapidly evolved over the last few decades, from using chat commands via Telnet and usenet , to making video calls via Skype and FaceTime. We can now simply speak to our mobile device when drafting an email or calling a friend instead of entering text with a keyboard. While computer-mediated communication has traditionally focused on human-to-human communication, a new paradigm may emerge that includes human conversations with artificial intel- ligence, given that talking "to" a computer is becoming as common as talking "through" a computer. It appears that it will not be long before we speak to a computer as if it was a human rather than just a machine. In 2011 Google introduced their voice search, and more recently, in 2014, a group of research- ers claimed that a computer had for the first time passed the Turing test (University of Reading, 2014), a "test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human" (Wikipedia, 2015).