Speaker Phone
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Arts and Mobile phones may seem like a strange pairing, but the University's Faculty of Arts is dialling into the cutting edge of mobile communications.
Using technology dubbed Communic8tor, researchers will use mobile phones to teach English in real-life situations.
This will be done through roleplays, interactive dialogues and automatic speech recognition, all integrated into a self-paced program of instruction customised to the individual learner.
It is the first-ever patent for which Faculty of Arts researchers at the University have applied.
Developed by postgraduate student Mike Proctor and Faculty of Arts Manager of Innovation and Commercial Development David Israel (pictured above), the technology arose from linguistics research in UQ's School of English, Media Studies and Art History.
The idea came to Mr Proctor following his work on UQ's innovative LanguageMAP project, an online assessment system that uses speech-recognition software to test the proficiency of language learners located anywhere in the world via the Internet.
"When we tossed the idea around the research group, we thought it would be great to market it to mobile-obsessed countries like Japan," Mr Proctor said.
He said the key aspect of mobile delivery meant someone could learn English while catching the train to work or whenever they had a spare moment.
"They would just dial in to the service and the program would remember what they were up to last time and they could get straight into it," he said. "We are imagining that a typical customer might be a Japanese couple planning to come to Australia on their honeymoon or a couple of high school kids preparing for an entrance exam.
"They have high school English but there's a hunger to learn more and rather than enrolling in language lessons, with Communic8tor they can just dial up our graded program. "With the help of the video interplay of the pre-recorded lessons they can learn specifi c things for their trip or drill themselves on specific problem areas.
"Eventually, we even hope to refine the lessons to teach particular accents."
Mr Proctor said the group was now in discussions with potential investors and with mNet Corporation in Adelaide, a consortium looking to help put the system through its paces on their third generation (3G) mobile technology test-bed network.
3G enables high speed transmission of text, digitised voice, video and multimedia to mobile phone and computer users, no matter where they are in the world.
Mr Israel said there was a lot of interest for Communic8tor because 3G providers around the world were "crying out" for content as the technology became more popular, particularly in countries like Japan, Korea and China.
Mr Israel said with over $20 billion spent on English language learning in Asia each year, there was exciting commercial potential.
More Information: http://www.arts.uq.edu.au
