Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our daily lives, from predictive text on smartphones to intelligent virtual assistants in our homes. A significant component of this technology is the AI chatbot, a software application that mimics human conversation using artificial intelligence. Chatbots such as ChatGPT by OpenAI and Geminiby Google have fundamentally changed how we interact with technology and each other. This article aims to provide an explanation of how these chatbots operate, their impact on communication and education, and the challenges and opportunities they present for lifelong learning.

A New York Times article reported on NELL - the Never-Ending Language Learning system - a research project under way at Carnegie Mellon University. NELL works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, scanning hundreds of millions of Web pages for text patterns that it uses to learn facts, 390,000 to date, with an […]

According to researchers at the University of California, putting children in front of educational DVDs does not help boost their language skills. The best boost for anyone's language skill is to speak and write.

Here's my rant of the day - They're at it again! CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) involves teaching a curricular subject through the medium of a language other than that normally used. What they're calling Plurilingual Education. For example, teaching a science lesson in German in a school in the UK. It looks as […]

The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) have recommended that pupils should learn subjects like history and geography in French to stem the decline of modern foreign languages. They said that students learned languages best in a bi-lingual environment, and schools that teach aspects of mainstream subjects in foreign languages had good results. Actually there's […]

German researchers say babies begin to pick up the nuances of their parents' accents while still in the womb. The researchers studied the cries of 60 healthy babies born to families speaking French and German. The French newborns cried with a rising "accent" while the German babies' cries had a falling inflection. Source: BBC News […]