Discover Magazine

Baldi Like Second Teacher in Tucker-Maxon Classrooms
By Jonathan Modie

George Fortier's new teaching assistant doesn't have much of a life.
    After all, he works for free, never goes home, never gets tired, never takes a break and never eats. In fact, Baldi, as this newest addition to Tucker-Maxon Oral School in Portland is called, doesn't have much of a personality at all.
    But in Fortier's Classroon, Baldi’s an asset. The students love him. He's patient. He never gets angry. He never complains. He's always amiable. And he's a good listener.
    Most Importantly, the students listen to him.
    Baldi is an animated , three dimensional talking head that actually speaks to the 8-to-11 year old children, all of whom are hearing impaired, using easy-to-use spoken language technology developed by the Oregon Graduate Institute for Spoken Language Understanding, a division of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering
    The CSLU Toolkit, a collection of software the combines voice recognition and text-to-speech synthesis, has been meshed with the talking head developed at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
    Baldi can ask the students questions as part of a word game, listen to the students' answers, then tell them is their answers are correct. If incorrect answers are given, Baldi works with the children if they get them right.
    Best of all, Baldi’s facial movements, including lips, teeth, and tongue, are extremely articulate

- the can be exaggerated or toned down to cater to different learning levels - allowing the students to read his lips while he talks and further enhancing their language development skills.
    "It's fantastic," says Fortier, who has been using the system in his classroom for the last three months. "It's something we've always dreamed about."
    Fortier was among a handful of Tucker-Maxon educator offered free training of the Toolkit by CSLU last fall. CSLU received a $1.8 million grant from the National Science foundation to create the Tucker-Maxon research program.
    Intel Corp also donated five top-of-the-line Pentium II computer platforms to the project.
    For Fortier, the system has given him an extra instructor - with all the time in the world.
    "It's always an issue, the time we can spend teaching something," Fortier says. The students "can go over on their own and spend as much time as necessary to sound that word out. Baldi's someone who's going to sit there and do the repetitions with them."
    In one lesson, the children are shown a map of the land mass and are asked to name a highlighted section.
    "What land form is this?" Baldi asks, his lips and his tongue moving in smooth tandem.
    "Coastal plain," one of the students responds.
    At times, the response is not articulate enough for Baldi, so he asks again and again until the students get it right.

     "If Baldi doesn't' recognize a word, he takes them through a training loop," Fortier says. "He's very lip readable and very accurate."
   Another computer in Fortier's classroom is for speech development. It teaches students how to say words by breaking them up into syllables, consonants and vowels. Long words, such as "revolutionary," have some students stumped, but Baldi's patience and ability to divide them into segments speeds the learning process.
    In the coming months, Tucker-Maxon teachers expect CSLU and Santa Cruz researchers to improve the timing of Baldi's speech, which is monotone and robotic, to allow their own voices to be integrated with the technology.
    Alice Davis, another Tucker-Maxon teacher who uses Baldi and the Toolkit in her classroom, says the technology has been a godsend.
    "I've got stories on there, I put math on there," Davis says, staring at the monitor. " I put speech on there, I put vocabulary on there. I've got constellations."
    The Toolkit has allowed Davis to integrate small comprehension quizzes into real children's stories she input into the computer using the system's text-to-speech components.
    When the students answer the questions correctly, Baldi moves onto the next "page" of the story. Baldi is even helping Davis' students learn Haiku poetry.
    "We're doing Japan as an all-school theme," she says.