Alioom is innovative concept of application that allows for an interactive conversation with native speakers generated by artificial intelligence. Users can fully engage in an almost natural dialogue thanks to a voice interface, gestures, and haptic signals. The distinguishing element of Alioom is a colourful ray that serves several functions - it connects branding and interface into a coherent whole while also attracting the user's attention and indicating the direction in which the conversation is developing.
Why we created the concept of Alioom?
The latest technological trends show customers expect much more from the digital world than visual and voice entertainment. We want more realistic interactions with every digital object and personality, including teaching apps.
Zima always keeps an eye on the most popular trends from the future and decided to pick out a few that we found challenging:
- Voice-activated and 3D interface
- Microinteractions and animation
- Realistic conversation with AI
- Gamification
- Natural language experience
- Product personalisation
We decided to use these trends to improve the digital language learning experience.
Problems:
Traditional language learning apps have some limitations that affect our experience and prevent us from being involved in the whole process. A narrow subject area limits our vocabulary; repetitive exercises make engaging difficult. Most of all, however, dictionary-based apps put little emphasis on pronunciation and are entirely devoid of feedback. The solution may be a conversation with a native speaker, which can give an engaging experience and focus on our improvement. But... only some users decide to take this step.
Why?
She is a student on a low budget, so tutoring is out of her reach. Her life is full of activities, so she wants to choose the right time and level of involvement, and she wants to be able to stop the conversation and start it again at the same point. In addition, conversations with others can be stressful for people who still feel insecure about their linguistic knowledge.
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The best response to Rita's needs was to use AI as a convenient, accessible and exciting interlocutor. We identify some critical features we need to design and combine them into the Alioom app concept.
Basic functionalities:
- Alioom enables users to select topics based on their needs and interests
- Alioom helps you improve your pronunciation by speaking naturally, stress-free and fluently
- Alioom provides a transcription of live conversations with clear visualisation of errors and misinterpretations
- Alioom suggests words or idioms that make dialogue more exciting and natural
- Alioom helps you evaluate progress and decide on the next steps
- The touchless voice-activated interface allows you to use Alioom anytime, anywhere, without taking your phone out of your pocket
In the Alioom project, we took up the futuristic concept of seamless conversation with AI, which we believe can become a reality at any time. We already use voice assistants, which learn to communicate better with users year by year.
It's important to keep track of dialogue in a language app, including in written form, so we couldn't completely abandon the use of the Ailoom chat-like conversation window. However, the design challenge was to approach the interface as a natural interaction field rather than a click area. In conversation, we use our voice - so it's logical that this is the voice we want to control in an application like Ailoom. It took careful analysis and design cunning to visualize this type of interaction, but the result was worth the effort.
The training of AI as a language teacher certainly requires further development of this technology. So we look forward to the future, hoping that one day Ailoom will come to market as an innovative language learning tool. We would definitely use it ;).
