IBM Watson Helps University Students Learn Mandarin

Wong's Mandarin class meets four times a week. On Mondays and Fridays, he attends a class in a traditional classroom with Helen Zhou, Associate Professor at the RPI. There he learns new vocabulary and gets an introduction to phrases and grammatical structures. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the class meets in the CIR, where students conduct conversations with virtual agents. In a restaurant environment, Wong said students can go through the entire process of sitting down in the restaurant, looking at a menu, ordering food, speaking with a waiter on how the food is prepared, and paying the bill.