An emerging trend in educational software is the implementation of animated characters, which provides a designed interface for actively engaging children. Moujaes offer complete animation solutions with Boomstar, a unified digital animation studio and original content production company. They specialize in high-end 2D and 3D animation, modeling, layout and design, visual effects, rendering, property development and entertainment marketing for television, film, video games, and software.



An emerging trend in educational software is the implementation of animated characters, which provides a designed interface for actively engaging children. Recent advancements in speech recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies have contributed to the development of conversational interfaces that utilizes animated characters. These interfaces have the potential for significant use in educational software by actively engaging children and supporting question asking and learning skills. Through current research, the specific auditory embodiment of animated characters as TTS output in software has a significant impact on children's engagement through an easy to use interface.

Auditory embodiment alone without any animation can have significant influence upon users? behavior in task-appropriate ways. Once animation is added, there are several factors that influence the engagement level of children. The main factor is the type of TTS voice used: either introvert or extrovert. Using extrovert TTS voices that are louder, faster, higher in pitch and wider in pitch range had a selective impact on children's educationally-relevant engagement behavior. The extrovert voice was more successful in motivating and managing tutorial exchanges. When asked socially motivated questions, there was no significant difference in response between introvert and extrovert voices.

Children ask more questions overall when they are interacting with animated characters, in which the type of animal is relevant to the topic. When studying biology, children engage very with marine characters with an extrovert TTS voice over an introvert voice. Children have reported through studies that 96% positively assessed animated characters, with 83% describing them as ?friends? or ?teachers? rather than strangers or parents. Children's engagement with the animated characters are reflected by the social quality of their conversations, showing empathy and emotional attachment.

Conversational interfaces designed as engaging animated characters can effectively stimulate children during learning-based activities, and can be implemented throughout the next generation of educational software. It is very important to match an appropriate TTS voice to an application domain in order to ensure the desirable impact on children's user behavior. If correctly implemented, this type of interfacing in educational software will be highly effective at directly engaging young children and stimulating learning-oriented behavior.

Moujaes is an animation studio enterprise, telling great stories through design. They brand, design and animate ideas, products, services, and entertainment for people around the world. They offer complete animation solutions with Boomstar, a unified digital animation studio and original content production company. They specialize in high-end 2D and 3D animation, modeling, layout and design, visual effects, rendering, property development and entertainment marketing for television, film, video games, and software. Moujaes and Boomstar's partnership delivers exceptional experiences for audiences everywhere.