Dead Time

Viglo's first test with the correct demographic will be coming up later today. We had one outside person try it a while ago, but that guy was new to Spanish and couldn't even understand basic conversations. It was after his call that I confirmed that Viglo's methodologies are only effective for Spanish students with at least a basic level of conversational ability.

My biggest concern right now about the call isn't the effectiveness of our methodologies or the student's enjoyment of Viglo. Instead, it's dead time... time spent with nobody saying anything and the student or Guide waiting for the other to be ready again to chat. Dead time occurs because one of the parties is preparing a prompt, or waiting for ChatGPT to provide results. When I'm doing my calls with Roxy, the dead time isn't awkward because we're dating and we understand that Viglo is still a process in development. But will users not involved with the development process be as forgiving?

But I'm excited too because I know that I'm about to get some real feedback for the first time, and this will be a huge step forward in refining and improving Viglo. The results of the call will be posted below.

UPDATE (THE DAY AFTER THE CALL)

The way we conducted the call is that while Roxy was practicing Spanish with the caller, I would sit out of view of the camera and listen in (with the callers knowing this ahead of time), and I was taking notes and prepping the climbs. Roxy handled the call very well, and we got through 2 different climbs. During the introduction Roxy and the caller shared their interests, and the caller said he liked to ski. So I quickly made a had ChatGPT give us a paragraph of a skiier talking about the fear he felt during his scariest time skiing. Roxy would read from that paragraph as if she was delivering a monologue to the student, and the student then would recall as much as he could for Roxy to demonstrate his understanding. Obviously she had to repeat parts of the paragraph several times, as Roxy does for me too when we use Viglo together. From my point of view, it seemed like the caller understood just enough of the paragraph to show that it wasn't too advanced for him, but he also learned several new vocab words and the climb was a tough challenge. (his thoughts later)

The caller did not know the word "aterradora," which means fear. So I prepared another climb in ChatGPT for him that specifically worked on that word in two different exercises. The first one was simply a reading exercise, where he read 5 sentences that used the word "aterradora." This let him hear the new word and see it used in context. Then the second exercise of the climb had Roxy asking the student to respond to questions and use the word "aterradora" in his responses. There were times that this took a lot of brain power from the student, but he did push through. I do think though that he was working at a good level for his abilities.

UPDATE (OCT. 21, 2023)
Since our first day, I've asked the student to give me feedback and tell me one thing he liked about Viglo, and one area he thinks we need to improve. It's been about a week and a half since our first chat, and I still haven't received that feedback, despite requesting it several times. Furthermore, he has not requested a third call, so this tells me that there could be something wrong with Viglo. (Obviously he just might not be prioritizing Spanish in his life, but I don't want to assume that that's the case since it doesn't force me to improve the product) Really the only thing to do next is find more testers.