Intelligent Voice Assistant to Facilitate Elementary School English Learning: A Case Study Using Amazon Echo Dot

This research focuses on exploring the English learning process for elementary school students. We employ Amazon Echo Dot, one of the most popular intelligent voice assistants nowadays, as a tool to facilitate language learning. We developed an Amazon Skill that incorporates the content from English textbooks for the participants to interact with using voice input. The operation logs from Echo Dot faithfully reveal student's usage patterns and preferences. A semester-long experiment has been conducted with the assistance of the Affiliated Experimental Elementary School (AEES) of National Chengchi University. After data collection has been completed, we utilize acoustic and transcript evaluation metrics to examine the voice recordings and user logs. Our initial analysis focuses on the active users, i.e., participants who have continued to engage in conversations with the voice assistant. Several questions regarding user behavior are prompted and responded based on the collected and processed data. Analyzing the content of the conversation will help disclose more detailed information regarding the learning process. The progress of individual students can also be monitored to determine if further assistance is needed.