Development of students’ foreign language communicative skills based on the character.ai web application

Importance . Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies can already significantly transform the traditional foreign language teaching process. Researchers from different countries are considering the linguistic and didactic potential of different artificial intelligence technologies for solving some educational and professional tasks. Character.ai is one of the artificial intelligence tools on the basis of which it is possible to develop foreign language communicative skills of the learner. At the same time, the development of a step-by-step foreign language teaching methodology based on character.ai has not been the subject of separate research. The purpose of the study is to examine the aspect of developing students’ foreign language communicative skills on the basis of character.ai web application and to develop a step-by-step method. Materials and Methods . The research methods are: analysis of pedagogical and methodical literature on the development of students’ foreign language communicative activity skills on the basis of various artificial intelligence tools, as well as the use of neural networks in foreign language teaching. Research and review articles from scientific journals included in the international scientific databases Scopus and Web of Science and the list of HAC RF have been used as materials for the study. An online survey has been conducted to determine students’ attitudes towards the use of character.ai web application in the teaching process. Results and Discussion. The following methodical functions of character.ai are identified: a) the possibility of creating a virtual person from scratch and choosing from ready-made ones; b) the possibility of using voice communication with a virtual person; c) the possibility of creating your own character and d) the possibility of changing the virtual person’s answer. These functions formed the basis for the development of a method of developing foreign language communicative activity skills on the basis of students’ interaction with the character.ai web application, consisting of six stages: 1) introductory; 2) goal setting; 3) technological; 4) interaction with the artificial intelligence; 5) discussion of results; and 6) assessment. A survey has been conducted to determine the learning domains of the learners’ use of the character.ai web application. The results of the survey show that: a) 37.4 % of the respondents used character.ai to practice role-playing; b) 40.2 % – to practice writing interaction; c) 22.4 % – to practice oral interaction. Conclusion . The novelty of this study consists in highlighting the methodical functions of the web application character.ai, which should be taken into consideration when developing methods of teaching a foreign language on its basis. The prospects of the study consist in the development of methods for the development of foreign language communicative skills of higher education students on the basis of the web application character.ai.