Voki - Creating Speaking Avatars!

What is Voki 

Voki (http://www.voki.com/) is a website which allows you to create your customized speaking avatars to express yourself and interact with your friends. It is an excellent tool which could be utilized in language classroom to motivate learners and make the class fun.

Making Your Own Voki

This video is taken from YouTube presenting how to make your own Voki.

How to Apply Voki in Language Class

• Students can recorded themselves via Voki and analyse their language. They can practice for many time before saving their satisfactory recording. In this process, speaking anxiety could be reduced and they would like to have more speaking practice via this tool than speaking in front of others. They can also send their own Voki URL to their teacher or friends for feedback and comments. 

• Teacher can utilize Voki to make the text more vivid and stimulating when preparing for lessons. Teacher could record their own voice or text to speech. In the text to speech function, voice from different languages could be chosen. For example, teacher could show the differences between British English and American English by choosing different voices for the character. Students listen to the voices and find the differences.

• Students can learn from the pronunciation  of the character in the Voki by typing the text to add the voice. They can learn different languages and the voice is fairly authentic. 

Benefits of Voki in Language Classroom

• Simple steps to customize your own speaking characters 
• Motivate students to participate in the classroom and encourage autonomous learning 
• Different languages can be selected, e.g. English, French, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, etc.  
• More opportunities are provided for students to practice speaking, listening and writing skills
• Voice can be added via phone call, microphone, text to speech or upload a file
• Voice added via text to speech is fairly authentic
• Helpful to reduce anxiety produced when speaking in front of teacher or students 
• Your own speaking characters can be shared via blogger, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Limitations

• Sign-up process is needed and only 15 days free trial of Voki Classroom
• Customizing characters may need quite a long time
• When adding voice via text to speech, words of your text might be missing when trying different voices and modification is required.
• Conversation activity could not be practiced via Voki since only one avatar can be produced for each time.
• Time limitation of voice added to the avatars is quite short (around 60s)
• Too many advertisements are embedded in the website

Further Reading 

• TechWeb2 introducing Voki                                                              http://teachweb2.wikispaces.com/Voki 

• Make your own Voki                                        http://jenniferbarnett.wikispaces.com/file/view/Voki+Tutorial.pdf