A Multilingual Embodied Conversational Agent

In our paper last year, we described our language-training program, which utilizes Baldi as a tutor, who guides students through a variety of exercises designed to teach vocabulary and grammar, to improve speech articulation, and to develop linguistic and phonological awareness. In this paper, we describe the technology of Baldi in more detail, and how it has been enhanced along a number of dimensions. First, Baldi is now multilingual and is capable of acquiring new languages fairly easily. Second, Baldi has grown a body to allow the communication of communicative gesture.