The Audio Chat item type sets up an audio conversation with a AI bot. It can be used for practicing discussion about a topic, an article or a picture. The prompts to the AI bot are free text and editable. So you have considerable flexibility in how you set up the audio chat sessions.


You can try an audio chat here: https://demo.poodll.com/mod/minilesson/view.php?id=1840


NB:  Audio Chat requires an Open AI key that the site administrator must provide and set in the Poodll MiniLesson admin settings page. 

An Open AI key can be obtained after creating an account at: https://platform.openai.com

Audio Chat may cost as much as 10c per minute in fees to OpenAI



An Audio Chat Session

A chat session in progress looks like this:


After the chat, AI will provide feedback and the chat transcript is saved so that it can be reviewed by both teacher and student.



The steps.


Step 1: Begin the session


The student should select the correct microphone (if more than one are on their device) and then press the "Start" button


Step 2: Wait for the session to commence


It takes about 15 seconds for the session to commence, at which point the AI will begin speaking.


Step 3: Chat!


The chat is audio only. The student's microphone will turn on automatically when the AI has finished speaking. But the student can click the mic to begin speaking at any time.


Key Controls

  • Auto send - if checked will detect silence when the mic is on, and submit the students audio, and turn off the mic
    - if unchecked the student will need to stop the mic to submit the audio

  • Microphone  - this will turn on automatically when it is the students turn to speak. But if clicked the student can interrupt the AI speaker and begin talking

  • End - The session will continue indefinitely until the End button is pressed. The AI may prompt the student to click "End"

Adding an Audio Chat to a MiniLesson

  1. From the Lesson Items tab, choose "Audio Chat"
  2. Give it the standard settings, title, item description, and question text.
  3. The AI requires two prompts: "Instructions for AI" and "Instructions for AI grading and feedback"
    The default prompt includes placeholders, eg {ai role}. These are replaced at runtime with the actual value for the Audio Chat instance. In this way you can largely use the default prompt and just change the topic or other data as appropriate. It is also possible to not use the placeholders at all.
  4. Set any additional information that you need for the chat if you are using placeholders , eg AI role, custom ai data 2
  5. Note that AI can not see the question text, so you will probably need to also set it in the "topic" field.


Reviewing Student Submissions

After the chat, the student and teacher can both review the transcript and feedback given to the student. The student accesses this from the item's review section on the finished page:


 

The teacher can see a similar view, by clicking "view" beside the attempt on the grade.


In the teachers case they will also see a "grade explanation" section that explains how the grade was calculated.
This is different to the students feedback, though the content may be similar.