Welcome

Archipelago is a suite of speech recognition tools, games, and dialogues to help students practice speaking Mandarin Chinese.

Each system is represented as an island. For a description of each island, hover your mouse over the links to the left.

Family Island

The Family Island is an immersive dialogue system for beginners. The topics range from gender to family relationships.

Even if you have never spoken or heard Chinese before, try to progress through the entire dialogue and pick up the necessary vocabulary along the way!

Translation Island

In this game, you will speak sentences in Chinese, guided by a list of English prompts. The computer awards you points if your translations are correct. You can click on individual items to get help, but you will lose points.

The system provides 12 lessons on different topics, and each lesson is a mixture of review and new materials. For reading practice, try the Pinyin or Chinese character modes!

Card Game Island

Build your own deck of image-based flash-cards using the integrated search tools.

Then load your deck of cards into a speech-enabled card game for fun vocabulary acquisition. To test out the card games on preset categories, try the "Word War" or "Rainbow Rummy" links.

Word War Card Game

Word War is picture-matching race in which you will have to use speech commands to manipulate a set of cards into their proper positions on the game grid. Race against the clock in single player mode, or against an opponent in the two-player mode.

This game is fully customizable: you can add your own cards! To start creating your own decks, try out the "Card Games" link.

Rainbow Rummy Card Game

Rainbow Rummy is a full fledged speech-enabled card game. Your dealt a set of colorful cards which must be arranged by their vocabulary item or color into sets of three or more. Play against the computer in a race to rid your hand of all your cards.

This game is fully customizable: you can add your own cards! To start creating your own decks, try out the "Card Games" link.

Time Traveler

Use Chinese speech to travel through time. One catch, though: your time machine is broken, so it can only understand certain numbers and commands. See how quickly you can get to your destination date. (HINT: every level is possible in 3 jumps or less.)

This game was created using the new WAMI Javascript API for speech recognition, available at http://wami.csail.mit.edu. You can copy the code and put it on your own web page!

Driving Directions

Take your car for a drive around the streets of San Francisco. Use Chinese speech to navigate your Google Street guy around the neighborhood to collect tokens. Once you've got them all, go back home for the win!

This game was created using the new WAMI Javascript API for speech recognition, available at http://wami.csail.mit.edu. You can copy the code and put it on your own web page!

Hobbies and Schedules

In this game, you will interact in spoken Chinese with a computer simulated conversational partner, to negotiate a time in the next few days to get together to jointly participate in an activity that you both "like to do." You will role play a pre-specified persona, with specific likes and dislikes, who already has other commitments on the calendar. You will need to find out what the robotic partner likes to do and when she is free in order to choose among available options. Each time you play the game, the constraints will be different.

A robotic tutor will assist you with your planning of what to say next. She will suggest something that should be appropriate at this point in the conversation, which you can adopt or choose to ignore. The difficulty level of the game ranges from 1 to 5. At level 1, you can let the tutor speak for you if you like -- you just observe the conversation unfolding between two computer voices. The tutor's displayed advice changes linguistic form at higher levels, from pinyin to English to characters. At level 5, the tutor will become invisible.