Is anyone working on chatbots for learning english / languages recently?

I’ve been working on such a thing using rivescript, but also extending it with some databases of words for quizzes etc. Our demo is at:

http://ComicEnglish.com/new

Be good to share any info with others in this space!

English Tutor is the only one I know of.

I used to be an indie comics editor and I have to say I like your application’s Film Noir art style, and the general interactive setup. I felt I was a bit thrown in head-first though, I was a bit lost as to what my role was in the game (It briefly states so in the first info bar, but it could use at least a short background story to get my detective hat on and know what it is I’m supposed to be doing there). The hand is clear but occasionally blocks the view: I didn’t realise the two buttons were separate sentence parts until I clicked one. Pressing buttons to sort sentence parts work great though, I love it. The yellow info-bar can get confusing when it gets caught up in the speech bubbles as if it’s part of the conversation. Have you tried putting it at the bottom of the screen? The instructions on the buttons and items are actually enough and often say the same thing, you could reserve the info bar for people who are really lost (hence, at the bottom).
Excuse the rockslide of friendly critisism, it’s a habit but I do really like what you’ve made here. Can I ask the name or site of the artist?

There is also http://www.tolearnenglish.com/ a site that helps you learn English and of course google translate https://translate.google.com/about/intl/en_ALL/

SpeakGlobal in Japan has ChatScript bots for teaching english. https://www.chatbots.org/chatbot/meg/

I could not get that site, http://www.speakglobal.co.jp,  to load i will try again later.

Don Patrick - Sep 8, 2015:

English Tutor is the only one I know of.

I used to be an indie comics editor and I have to say I like your application’s Film Noir art style, and the general interactive setup. ....
Excuse the rockslide of friendly critisism, it’s a habit but I do really like what you’ve made here. Can I ask the name or site of the artist?

Thanks for the comments. yes, the UI has a lot of rough edges to it, but recently I’m shifting to putting the app onto chat platforms like WeChat and telegram, so not focused as much on the standalone front-end UI. The team is too thin to do client and server, and hoepfully wechat should give us some boost for user acquisition.

the UI there is more limited, and so that does put a lot more demand on the actual chat script content itself being more interesting. Hence I’m looking for ideas, if there is any chabot material or archives that could be used as a starting point for an ESL script?

Bruce Wilcox - Sep 9, 2015:

SpeakGlobal in Japan has ChatScript bots for teaching english. https://www.chatbots.org/chatbot/meg/

Yes, I checked that out a while back. It seemed the chat scripting had some good core parts, I guess you were responsible for some of that? Seems they took it offline now though :(

I’d be interested if you learned any lessons from making content for that project that could be applied going forward?

We tried “teaching” type content and test students found it boring.
Simple scenarios “checking into a hotel” etc were useful, but not that engaging either.

The detective story format we have now was more engaging, but it’s so time consuming to author that it’s a labor of love. Perhaps there’s a way to build a visual authoring tool, but that’s quite a big investment.

Sheryl Clyde (#2) - Sep 8, 2015:

There is also http://www.tolearnenglish.com/ a site that helps you learn English and of course google translate https://translate.google.com/about/intl/en_ALL/

thanks for the comment. there are tons of ESL sites, i was more interested in chatbot material (in any chatbot script dialect) or example of chatbots teaching ESL.