Creating your own AI Character for students to practise languages

 This is going to be a very short post! My friend Melanie Hughes, sent this infographic to me yesterday night

It links to a blogpost written by Luis Pardo in the official Quizalize Blog. For the whole blogpost, which is very good, as it shows ideas on how to use the different tools, click here. Among the different tools, Character.ai really caught my eye, especially because, for now, it is free. 

The idea is to create a character, to chat with, who can become your little teaching assistant. I thought that I could create a Spanish character: Maribel Madrigal, for my students to chat with and practise their Spanish. 

The process was really simple. I signed in with my Google account and within seconds I created the Maribel character. I also checked the terms and conditions of this tool, which estates that children must be 13 years old or older to use the tool, so ideal for Y10/Y11 students. 

Once I created my Maribel character, I made it unlisted. Meaning, that only people with whom I share the character link can see Maribel and chat with her.  This is the link that I will need to share with my students.  Have a go and let me know what you think!  It also speaks to you, not just chatting! 

I gave it a try. Below you can see some screenshots of the little conversation we had, where I pretended to be a GCSE student.  For the whole conversation click here. Students cannot see each other conversations, unless they share the link, which I can ask them to do with me!

This is how I can see Character.ai working in the classroom:

1. As a whole class activity: I show the character and we all ask Maribel questions on the topic we are studying and translate her answers.

2. I can share the character link and ask students to have at least a 10 question conversation with Maribel for homework. Students will need to share their conversation task with me, which I can assess.

3. In class, I can share the link with students, and they can have a 5 minute silent conversation or in pairs with Maribel. They can look new words up in the dictionary online, and then have a discussion of what type of answers they got. 

4. Students can use it independently at home to chat with Maribel any time they want to in order to practise their linguistic skills. Remember that Maribel can talk, so it can be used as listening, but also as reading and of course writing!

ChatGPT can also do this for you and your students, but, I really think that Character.ai interface is really cool and more appealing to students.