Impact of Experiencing Misrecognition by Teachable Agents on Learning and Rapport
This addresses the reliability of speech-based educational tools for learners, but the findings are incremental as they confirm no impact rather than proposing new solutions.
The study investigated whether misrecognition errors by automatic speech recognition in teachable agents affect learning gains and rapport with learners, finding no significant relationship regardless of the intended agent responses.
While speech-enabled teachable agents have some advantages over typing-based ones, they are vulnerable to errors stemming from misrecognition by automatic speech recognition (ASR). These errors may propagate, resulting in unexpected changes in the flow of conversation. We analyzed how such changes are linked with learning gains and learners' rapport with the agents. Our results show they are not related to learning gains or rapport, regardless of the types of responses the agents should have returned given the correct input from learners without ASR errors. We also discuss the implications for optimal error-recovery policies for teachable agents that can be drawn from these findings.