Bob - A General Culture Game with Voice Interaction

This paper presents a general culture game, called Bob, implemented as a skill for Amazon’s software assistant Alexa. The main motivation of this work is to enable learning through games and smart devices, which are nowadays part of most children’s lives and homes. The Bob game provide users with general culture questions from the geography field, more specifically related to cities, countries, and lakes. The questions are formed by extracting and analyzing information from two major knowledge sources, DBpedia and Wikidata, both massively used in the natural language processing field. Bob can initiate general culture tests, during which questions will be automatically adapted to the knowledge level of the player through Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT). Following user specified settings, Bob also offers the possibility to rank players according to their performance and to post Twitter statistics on request. One major advantage of our solution comes from the fact that the application can be used through Amazon Echo or through a smartphone, allowing the child to access it from home or from any place with Internet connection.