University of Colorado at Boulder researchers are among a group of U.S. innovators who traveled to France in early May to share their expertise with French researchers who want to develop virtual speech and language therapists.
The CU-Boulder Center for Spoken Language Research, or CSLR, researchers have been designing virtual therapists for the past seven years, testing the technology in clinical trials in the Denver and Chicago metropolitan areas. Unlike avatars or other "V-People" created for Web site and video-game entertainment, virtual therapists are designed to tutor children with reading problems and to help adults reclaim language skills impaired by stroke or Parkinson's disease.
Last year, a University of Bordeaux researcher asked Ron Cole, then director of CU's Center for Spoken Language Research, to organize a workshop so French investigators could learn more about virtual speech and language therapists. The workshop was May 2 and May 3 at Victor Segalen University in France's southwest Bordeaux region. The National Science Foundation funded the research and the workshop.
Studies conducted over the past 30 years indicate that students and patients respond best to one-on-one teaching or therapy. But human teachers and therapists are not always available due to time and physical limitations. Researchers believe virtual people can fill in for humans when students need individual help or when patients in rural areas cannot travel long distances for treatment.
"What the Internet provides now is the opportunity to provide these therapies with online clinician oversight," said Cole, chief scientist at the Boulder-based company Mentor Interactive. "It's possible to have hybrid systems that put humans in the loop for a little bit of the time. We think this is the future."
Since 2001, CSLR researchers have developed animated characters designed to provide guided, individualized tutoring sessions for students and patients. Â鶹ÒùÔº in 10 Colorado elementary schools have been interacting with a 3D virtual teacher called Marni during clinical trials over the past two years.
The technology behind Marni is based on motion-capture methods used by Hollywood animation studios, computer programming, speech recognition technology and years of clinical research into the most effective speech and language therapies. CU-Boulder researchers also consulted with an international facial expressions expert.
"We refined her appearance until we produced believable and realistic expressions," Cole said of Marni. "She can produce expressions that go well with the tone of the voice to produce a varied delivery - just like a real storyteller."
CU-Boulder researchers are focusing their efforts on applications aimed at helping children who are learning English or who have reading challenges. They also are testing therapies for adults who have trouble speaking clearly due to Parkinson's disease or aphasia caused by strokes. Lorraine Ramig, a professor in CU-Boulder's speech, language and hearing department, developed the Parkinson's treatment.
Several schools in the St. Vrain, Denver Archdiocese and Boulder Valley school districts currently are participating in the development of ICARE, a learning assessment program featuring the virtual teacher Marni.
Next year Marni will participate in a National Institutes of Health-funded study to evaluate students' response to learning intervention. The latter program, one of five projects at the Colorado Learning Disabilities Research Center, will investigate whether all children can benefit from more intensive, individualized reading tutoring using a virtual teacher. Â鶹ÒùÔº will work on computers four times a week for 15 minutes to 30 minutes a day, depending on their age.
"We will study whether children who respond quickly or slowly to the programs differ from each other in other ways," said Barbara Wise, a CSLR researcher and independent educational therapist. "And we will study what are the more effective times to measure progress."
Â鶹ÒùÔº will work with the programs until they achieve grade-level reading, or up to two years, Wise said.
Sponsors of the Bordeaux workshop included the NSF; CSLR; the Boulder-based Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities; Victor Segalen University; and other French entities. Researchers from the University of Arizona, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago and the Air Force Academy also will attend.
For more information about the CU-Boulder Center for Spoken Language Research and each of the Virtual Tutoring and Therapy programs, visit the CSLR Web site at cslr.colorado.edu/beginweb/research.html. For information about the workshop go to cslr.colorado.edu/beginweb/bordeaux_wkshp.
To listen to a photo-enhanced CU-Boulder podcast about Marni, visit .