Sustainable Role of AI Robots for EFL Learners: Strengths, Weaknesses and Proposals

The aim of this research is to examine how AI EFL (English as a foreign language) learning robots affected learners by analyzing the functions and user experience. For this purpose, data were collected from positive, medium and negative views of five selected robots with EFL learning functions of over 5000 reviews on JD.com. Findings mainly indicated three points. First, the AI robots for EFL learning mainly focus on children, and few ones are targeted at adults. Second, the most frequently mentioned key words/phrase by at least 10% of users of the five robots are appearance, picture book, sound effect, operation, sensitivity, function, freedom, workshop, and quality. Next, the main advantages of the product for English learning can be non-linguistic aspects such as learning interest motivation and visual health protection and opinions vary on the shortcomings. This study showed that the improvements need to be made mainly in four aspects, that is, combining the latest big data and voice technology to enhance interaction capabilities; increasing the breadth of users age, profession, etc. to meet the learning needs of different people; developing unique learning strategies and plans for individual users; and meeting the learning needs of different scenarios such as travelling, professional fields, language exams, etc. These results of the study have implications for the research and development of AI EFL learning robot and sustainable development of EFL learners.