VOICE ASSISTANTS AS A TRAINING TOOL IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASS

This article covers the didactic potential of the intelligent personal assistants (voice assistants) for reaching the communicative competence during the foreign language acquisition. The authors of the article emphasize that the variety of modern voice assistants embedded to the users’ personal devices (such as Siri, Google Assistant, etc.) and available for teachers as tools is necessary to study in detail since their functions and communicative abilities (although they have some visible similarities) nevertheless differ. These differences become especially distinctly when we use these “programs” at the foreign language classes. To illustrate that, authors describe particularly one of the newest voice assistants’ educational potential, the Russian assistant of Yandex – Alice, in Russian as a foreign language class. The article outlines the differences that Alice has with the analog voice assistants and describes its didactic capacities, as well as how they can be used from the very beginning of language learning. The authors of the research also present a system of the exercises with Alice, that supplements the blended language learning model for the beginners. The system of the exercises was tested during teaching Russian in several multinational students’ groups and the results of the experiment are represented in the study in detail.