Assisted Speech to Enable Second Language

Abstract

Speaking a second language (L2) is a desired capability for billionsof people. Currently, the only way to achieve it naturally is througha lengthy and tedious training, which ends up various stages offluency. The process is far away from the natural acquisition of alanguage.In this paper, we propose a system that enables any person withsome basic understanding of L2 speak fluently through "Instant As-sistance"provided by digital conversational agents such as GoogleAssistant, Microsoft Cortana, or Apple Siri, which monitors thespeaker. It attends to provide assistance to continue to speak whenspeech is interrupted as it is not yet completely mastered. The notyet acquired elements of language can be missing words, unfa-miliarity with expressions, the implicit rules of articles, and thehabits of sayings. We can employ the hardware and software of theassistants to create an immersive, adaptive learning environmentto train the speaker online by a symbiotic interaction for implicit,unnoticeable correction.