MILLA – online language practice with BelowHorizon’s language agent
Hi! Salut! Hallo! Dia Dhuit! ¡Hola!
MILLA is a multimodal, interactive, language learning agent developed by BelowHorizon, a spinout of the ADAPT Centre.
She’s not exactly a chatbot, she’s a spoken dialog system – think chatbot’s older smarter sister.
She can guide you through language lessons and help you practice your listening, reading, and speaking!
We are hosting free online English, French, German and Spanish practice sessions on our prototype system. The activities will suit anyone who wants to work on their language skills and have a chat with MILLA.
The activity is very suitable for Junior Cert and Leaving Cert students taking Modern Foreign Languages, and for migrants who want to improve their English.
The activity has two parts:
- Free access to prototype lessons
- Debrief on how MILLA uses speech technology and a survey to help us improve MILLA
To participate, sign up for a FREE account:
1. Go to https://www.milla.ie/signup
2. Sign up to access lessons.
3. You'll get a confirmation email from BelowHorizon/Milla - click to confirm signup and you're set!
4. There are sample lessons in the START2021 folder for English, Spanish and German, based on the work of the ADAPT centre.We hope MILLA will help participants see that understanding another language is a matter of practice, and demonstrate the useful ways speech technology and spoken dialog systems can help.
Emer Gilmartin is a researcher working on human-machine spoken dialog and CEO of BelowHorizon, a spin out of the ADAPT Centre