Alexa as a CALL platform for children: Where do we start?

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of Amazon's Alexa as a platform for children's CALL games, highlighting initial challenges and user reactions from a small-scale informal experiment.

Contribution

It provides an initial assessment of Alexa's suitability for children's CALL games and identifies fundamental platform issues that need addressing.

Findings

Children and parents reacted positively to the games.

Fundamental platform issues hinder the development of compelling CALL games.

The games will be available for download on the Alexa store.

Abstract

Amazon's Alexa is now widely available and shows interesting potential as a platform for hosting CALL games aimed at children. In this paper, we describe an initial informal experiment where we created some simple CALL games and made them available to a few child testers. We report the children's and parents' reactions. Our overall conclusion is that, although Alexa has many positive features, there are still fundamental platform issues in the current version that make it very difficult to build compelling CALL games for children. The games used will soon be freely available for download on the Alexa store.