The DigiTala project has been in operation with funding from the Academy of Finland in 2019–2023, and this autumn the project will end. During the project, models for the automatic assessment of Finnish and Swedish speech have been developed and a tool used in Moodle has been implemented for students to perform automatically assessed oral tasks.
DigiTala's university consortium (Helsinki, Jyväskylä and Aalto) has received funding from the Academy of Finland for a new AASIS project for 2023–2027. In the AASIS (Automatic assessment of spoken interaction in L2) project, the research perspective shifts from speech to automatic assessment of other interactions, such as gestures and facial expressions. The target group of the study is Finnish L2 adult students. The aim is to expand and refine the assessment tool based on automatic speech recognition developed in the DigiTala project to also identify non-linguistic communication features that rely on auditory and visual perception.
In June, members of the DigiTala project group from the Universities of Helsinki, Jyväskylä and Aalto celebrated the summer and the final phase of the project on the atmospheric island of Harakka. Most of the team will continue to work in one way or another also on the AASIS project, so in Harakka the team wished see yous instead of goodbyes.