Can a voice recorder be included in the scene?

[alicegDaF]

I would like to offer my learners the opportunity to add their answers to the question asked by the puppet. Is it possible to integrate a voice recorder and can the answer then  be sent to the teacher? Alternatively, the answer could be recorded as speech to text and then sent to the teacher.

Can anybody advise me on this?

Thank you

Alice

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

Not exactly. Character Animator just animates a puppet. It does not share the puppet with others - it can just create a video stream.

What you need to do is hook it up with other software like google hangouts, Skype, twitch, etc. That software would both send the video stream to the student and listen for the response. So what you are after can be done, but needs character animator plus the video streaming product you choose. You may also need something like OBS studio to glue the packages together, in which case I would add a fast computer to the requirements! 🙂

[alicegDaF]

Thank you very much! This is very helpful!

Alice

[alank99101739]

I was just reading this again - I may have misunderstood your original question a bit. Do you need live chat? Or are you after more like a web page that has an embedded YouTube video on in and multiple choice or text area underneath it? More like a learning management system? You can certainly use Character Animator to create the little video snippets. You just need something to collect the answers.

The hard bit is if you want to track who left a response. Now you need a database of user accounts, passwords, etc. Do you have something like that already? E.g. Moodle, a forum package, Google for Education, Google Forms, Survey Monkey, etc. You don’t want to set up a new set of user accounts - password management is a pain!

Note: this is an area that quite interests me, so feel free to describe what you are trying to achieve in more detail, plus any systems your school/whatever already has. And what sorts of questions you want to collect - e.g. free text, multiple choice, etc.  Note that more and more systems are providing voice recognition built in - so voice collection is getting easier.

For example, one application I am trying to build in my spare time (ha!) is a Google Assistant application. You can use Google Assistant from your phone or tablet (you don’t have to have a Google home etc). On my phone I have got it to accept different inputs and  play a video (it takes you to a web site (YouTube) to view the video). The video is created by Character Animator. This could ask questions instead and collect the responses. It does get tricky if you need to collect user identity - and collecting information about children for example has strict restrictions (may not be possible).

[alank99101739]

What devices should they be able to respond from? Flash won’t work from an iPhone for example if they should be able to use their own device.

Is the teacher going to check their answer? For grades? If so you will need to authenticate users. And you need a way for a teacher to check what responses have been provided but not graded yet.

You mentioned mic and text as input. Is the teacher meant to check their pronunciation? Or do you want speech to text conversion and just text that you will check? That puts more responsibility on the speech to text converter, but the user will see the result before they submit so they can fix it still.

Or is this for self assessment - more like flash cards.