There’s apparently a shortage of English teachers in South Korea, but the Philippines has tons of them. You’d think the easy solution would be to bring the teachers to South Korea, but they’ve come up with a different solution: they’re having the teachers teach from the Philippines through robots sporting Caucasian faces.
Yep, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology has developed the Engkey, a white egg-shaped bot topped with the face of a woman. The system uses facial recognition software to sense the facial movements of the teacher in the Philippines and translate them to the bot’s Emma-Watson-like avatar. The teachers can make the robots move around, dance and watch children through their cameras…their creepy, creepy cameras.
So far 29 of the robots are being used in a pilot program at 21 schools throughout South Korean and the government spent 1.58 billion Won ($1.37 million US) on the project. Which sounds like a lot of money, but when you consider how weirded out those kids in the photo look…it’s money well spent.
koreans just cant accept that they’re learning english from filipinos… so they have to make this robots to keep they’re EGO afloat… sad really
koreans just cant accept that they’re learning english from filipinos… so they have to make this robots to keep their EGO afloat… sad really
South Koreans are extremely xenophobic and prideful. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that they would do this so that a “brown” filipino isn’t in the country teaching them english (filipinos are considered low class). Even caucasians teaching English in SK have a difficult time, constantly dealing with discomforting stares and popular perceptions that they are there to rape their kids (white male teachers).
I’ve lived an worked in Korea for 7 years now after travelling all over the world and Koreans are some the of the most racist people on the planet. They have 2 words to distinguish between humans– Korean, and Foreigner. If your not one, you’re the other -even when a Korean is in a foreign country, all the natives are still considered ‘foreigners’
As for teachers, forget it if your anything but blond with blue eyes– according to Koreans, you can’t possibly speak English unless you have these traits, and if you do speak English, you can’t be that good at it, so you deserve a much lower salary then those around you.
As mentioned before– all teachers are drug addicted, HIV infected, sex-crazed Canadians now, so they’ve resorted to robots because no one wants to work in those areas of Korea anymore. The only places that have foreigners working as teachers are the major metropolitan areas of Seoul and Pusan