Jinhua News Network July 5th news Jinhua Daily reporter Chen Liyuan
"Kitten, kitten, music...music..." The children surrounded the intelligent companion robot "kitten" on the desk, scrambling to issue voice commands. Unlike ordinary children, their sentences are inconsistent and their pronunciation is not clear. They are hearing-impaired students at Jinhua Special Education School, and the "Kitten" is a loving student gift they received from a technology company.
The summer vacation has just begun. With the help of the Municipal Women's Federation, this technology company from Hangzhou sent the newly developed 20 intelligent companion robots to Jinhua Special Education School. The company's head specially introduced the use method for hearing-impaired students. According to reports, the company has developed my country's first smart speaker, focusing on human-computer interaction and facial recognition technology for many years. The donated intelligent companion robot has built-in 8 microphones, which has a high accuracy in recognition at a distance. It can not only be used as aiding learning and rehabilitation training for hearing-impaired students, but also provides them with online educational resources and artificial intelligence interaction, and also has the feature of storytelling and music playing. The total value of the products donated this time is more than 100,000 yuan. The person in charge said that "let everyone enjoy technology" is the business philosophy of the company, which satisfies the user experience of hearing-impaired children, and can make artificial intelligence products and new human-computer interaction methods more popular, and is also one of the social responsibility of companies.
The original name of these intelligent companion robots is "Ruoqi". Considering the difficulty of pronunciation of children, "Ruoqi" was changed to "Kitten" through settings. "Kitten" is very popular among children. Wherever they are placed, there are a group of children talking around them. In order to issue voice commands that allow the "kitten" to react, the children pronounced them carefully over and over again. Most of the time, the "kitten" is unable to interact with them, but the reactions it makes the children laugh. And once a word of theirs makes the "kitten" live, let it play music successfully, or give a weather forecast, the children laugh even more happily.
Looking at these babbling students, Zheng Xianling, head of the school’s hearing impairment department, said that she would put the “kittens” into the classroom to help teachers rehabilitate the children. The school has more than 130 hearing-impaired students, more than one-third of whom are under the age of 12. When they first arrived at school, many children could not speak, and some parents also had no hope for their language recovery. "In fact, if children of lower age groups have residual hearing, they can also undergo rescue rehabilitation." Zheng Xianling said that interest guidance and training plays a very important role in language rehabilitation. Some children cannot hear clearly and are unwilling to listen. Over time, they regard the vague external sounds as noise.
The meaning of "kitten" is that it can stimulate these children's interest in speaking and listening, and accompany them in their spare time to train. "Our hearing impaired department has 26 teachers, and the staff is still relatively tight when it comes to providing children with individual training. When the 'Kitten' comes, we have 20 more teachers. When talking and interacting with the 'Kitten', even the introverted and unwilling to speak are very active." Zheng Xianling introduced that with the care of all sectors of society, with the help of the wings of technology, hearing impaired students have many favorable conditions for language rehabilitation. In addition to intelligent companion robots, the children also have world-class hearing aids, hearing detection equipment and language training equipment. "I believe that in three years, we will have many 'deaf but not dumb' hearing-impaired children here." Chen Leihong, chairman of the Women's Federation of
, participated in the donation event and took the children to interact with the "kittens". She said that no one can be left behind in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. Technology allows every child, including hearing-impaired children, to share the dividends of reform and become a small builder of society.
