The Digichaint Interactive Game as a Virtual Learning Environment for Irish.

Although Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis has been little used in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), it is ripe for deployment, particularly for minority and endangered languages, where learners have little access to native speaker models and where few genuinely interactive and engaging teaching/learning materials are available. These considerations lie behind the development of Digichaint, an interactive language learning game which uses ABAIR Irish TTS voices. It provides a language-rich learning environment for Irish language pedagogy and is also used as a testbed to evaluate the intelligibility, quality and attractiveness of the ABAIR synthetic voices.