Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them. Project number: 2023-1-NL01-KA220-HED-000155675. Hogeschool West-Vlaanderen, almost always shortened to "Howest", is a university of applied sciences in West Flanders, a province of Belgium with five campuses situated in Bruges and Kortrijk. Howest is an entrepreneurial University of Applied Sciences known for its innovative and interdisciplinary approach to education and research, and its close collaboration with industry, business and the social profit sector. Howest is a member of Ghent University Association and is fully accredited by NVAO, the Dutch-Flemish Accreditation Organisation. It offers 24 Bachelors, 10 Associate Degrees and many Postgraduate Certificate programmes, all with a strong practical focus, in the areas of Business & Management, Industrial Sciences & Technology, Digital Design, Architecture, Healthcare, Education and Social Sciences. Digital Arts & Entertainment digitalartsandentertainment.be Digital Arts and Entertainment (DAE) has been crowned best game design and development school in the world three times in the last five years (2021-2018-2017) by The Rookies World School Rankings®, making DAE a top international player in game design and art education. Howest DAE is ranked #25 in the 2022 Princeton (USA) Review’s Top 50 of Game Design Undergraduate programmes. DAE grew from 180 students and 1 major to 1500 students and 6 majors, in 17 years’ time. Description of case During the Applied Psychology degree at Howest, students are taught various conversational strategies. To practise this skill, students take part in role-playing exercises. These exercises require a lot of teacher commitment, are difficult to evaluate, give limited feedback to each student, give limited flexibility in the learning process, and are heavily dependent on peer effort. The focus of the project is to replace these role-playing exercises with an AI agent which takes on the client role, and allows the students to talk to a virtual character instead of one of the other students. To accomplish this, the team makes use of Large Language Models, a recent advancement in AI technology known widely from OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Leveraging this new tech allows the virtual persona to be creative, and answer questions correctly, while still sticking to present backstory information and personal characteristics. Some personas might be open, willing to share, looking for a solution, others might be more closed-off, requiring specific questions and strategies to disclose more information. Aside from the Large Language Model, the tool also uses speech-to-text and textto-speech to allow the user to speak with the virtual client, as well as using Metahumans and speech-to-animation to create a virtual character that embodies the client, giving the users a more natural feeling as if they were speaking to a real person, instead of feeling like they are talking to a computer.
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