Prof. Chen said, “There are four common language learning barriers: environment, context, opportunity, and ownership. AI robots can eliminate these barriers.” Technology is advancing rapidly. Ten years ago, Apple just released the IPhone 5 and the famous human-like robot Sophia wasn’t invented yet. Fast forward to today, robots can now serve as teachers for young children. Thanks to the Internet's convenience, communication between people has become more accessible, and job opportunities have expanded globally. In our globalized world, multilingualism enhances competitiveness in this era. Language learning is proved to have the best results during the early stages of a child's development. Today, Prof. Chen’s talk demonstrated how AI robots can be useful for future generations.

​

In the talk, Prof. Chen demonstrated how the chatbot can help kids learn about vocabularies of body parts by scanning the QR code on the corresponding part of the doll. Also, it can “hear” the response when it asked the child to repeat the vocabulary he or she just learned. For example, the bot may teach the word “body” and the kid has to repeat this vocab again and the bot can determine whether the learner pronounced it correct or not. Another advantage is the transition between English and Chinese, facilitating the teaching of bilingualism to children. In the talk, we heard the chatbot generating a fairy tale using two different languages with pictures on its screen. The artificial intelligence breakthrough the problem of the educator being monolingual. Overall, educational robots are advantageous and the several benefits clearly can make up shortcomings of human.

​

While chatbots appear beneficial, there is still room for improvement before these robots can fully support a child's learning process. In the talk, pictures that the AI generated when telling the story were quite terrifying. As the images were generated on the spot, they are certainly uncensored and might create fear in children. Besides, it might generate incorrect images, potentially misleading children, as it is uncontrollable what the AI may show. To illustrate, it is known that AI struggles with hands and fingers as they are small parts of the human body. We as people with basic knowledge would know that it is a painting error if the human drawing by AI has more than five fingers on one hand. However, kids that are still learning how to speak may not have the ability to judge. Moreover, during today's demonstration, when the chatbot narrated the story in Mandarin, the vocabulary used was not sufficiently colloquial for a toddler. This might prompt a human educator to rephrase the story, potentially defeating the purpose of using robots as teaching aids.

​

To conclude, it is definite that generative AI and robots has potential in education. Currently, the chatbot has some limitations and incomplete educational functions. However, as AI technology matures in the future, it holds the potential to significantly aid humans and enhance the learning process for future generations.