IDI Press Release SPEECH RECOGNITION AND MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGY

IDI Press Release – March 12, 1999

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SPEECH RECOGNITION AND MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGY BRING EDUCATION TO LIFE

Learning Through Conversations With Virtual People

Bethesda, MD – March 12, 1998 – Interactive Drama Inc. (IDI) is using speech recognition and digital video technology to create voice-controlled, multimedia applications that allow people to talk directly to virtual human subjects. IDI calls these Virtual Conversations® programs.

The simple act of picking up and speaking into a microphone initiates a realistic "person-to-person" dialogue with a video subject whose image fills the computer screen. Direct eye contact and give-and-take dialogue with the subject draw the user in. An intelligent prompting system allows the user to conduct a meaningful, uninterrupted conversation with the subject for well over an hour.

"The magic of dialogue is what we are creating," says William G. Harless, Ph.D., president and founder of IDI. "Since people learn most effectively by talking to each other, this process has profound implications for education."

No voice training is necessary to use the programs and nearly anyone can spontaneously speak to the video characters, be understood, and conduct a conversation. The CD-ROM programs run on standard personal computers.

Developed initially for medical education purposes, Virtual Conversations® programs can be used for information and training applications in a wide variety of fields. Using this process of virtual dialogue, IDI programs have been developed to:

train physicians to detect and counsel patients whose sexual practices put them at high risk for HIV infection by talking to virtual patients about their sexual history;

teach language students how to speak a foreign language by talking with native speakers;

educate families caring for a brain-injured member about what to expect and how to cope during the long road to recovery through dialogue with experienced caregivers; and

inform women about breast cancer, mammography, and breast health through dialogue with an expert physician.

IDI has been designing and producing interactive video simulations for experiential learning since 1984. Early research and development of the Virtual Conversations® method and its authoring software, Conversim®, was supported by the National Library of Medicine. A rigorous national field test of the model in 1987, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), demonstrated the intense intellectual and emotional involvement users experience when they interact with human video subjects. The conversational method was awarded a patent (#5,006,987) in 1991.

Recently, significant learning gain has been demonstrated in field tests of every application developed. "We have capitalized on the fact that learning occurs naturally and incidentally when people are engaged in conversation," says Harless.

IDI research and development activities have been funded by grant awards from NIH and contracts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For More Information Contact:

Marcia A. Zier
Interactive Drama Inc.
7900 Wisconsin Avenue Suite 200, Bethesda, MD 20814
Tel: 301.654.0676
FAX: 301.657.9174
Email: mzier@idrama.com

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