AI avatar for communication training
A speaking avatar students hold a conversation with to see how they come across. A third-party product rather than a chatbot: it opens in its own tab.
What it is: an avatar that speaks and listens, used to practise communication skills. Unlike the other examples here this is not a text chat but a spoken conversation with a visible counterpart.
The counterpart. He is not real: the face, the voice and the replies all come out of Meta-skills' system.
Used by: drs. Esther Schagen, Faculty of Social Sciences. Supplied by: Meta-skills. Runs on: meta-skills.io, outside the VU.
The training opens in a new tab on meta-skills.io. You sign in there first, and your browser asks permission for the microphone.
What the Education Lab looked into here
How convincing and how pedagogically useful a richer form of simulation is for teaching communication. At the same time this pilot made visible that applications of exactly this kind raise procurement, privacy and accessibility questions quickly. An innovation can be pedagogically interesting and still be heavy going for the organisation - which is precisely the sort of lesson that belongs in this collection.
Why the training is not embedded in this page
We tried to show the simulation here directly. Meta-skills does not allow it: their page sends the rule frame-ancestors 'none', with which a supplier blocks embedding on any other website. A window in this page would stay blank. Hence the button above, which opens the training in its own tab.
That is a lesson from the pilot in itself. A company’s service runs in its own environment, with its own sign-in and its own rules, and does not simply slide into a VU page or a Canvas course.
What an avatar adds
In communication training the form is the subject. Pace, interrupting, letting a silence sit - none of that is practised in text. Against that, an avatar is a heavier instrument: an outside supplier, an account, and recordings of conversations that end up somewhere.