We’ve had a chatterbot on EFL Classroom for a long time and it gets the most email kudos! I like our Dave better than this example, mostly because the voice is of a much higher quality and it is also much more intelligent than this bot. Dr. Wallace has the right model and you’ll get much more fluid conversation with the Dave ESL chat bot.

I’m working with another person to develop a bot for students where you don’t have to type! This is a significant drawback for ELLs. The model is to have a menu of selected questions/replies which the students click . This is converted into speech and then Dave replies. Voice recognition works for me at home and I can speak to Dave but unfortunately right now, it takes too long to train a person’s voice to make it internet functionable.

Check out Dave at http://eflclassroom.ning.com/wpage/bot

I also have a very long but interesting blog entry about chatterbots with many more links to ones like this. Click Blogs on EFL Classroom 2.0

David

more info here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5303126.stm