By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea - Carefully trained by a government-run lab, she is the latest and perhaps most innovative recruit in South Korea’s obsessive drive to teach its children the global language of English.

Over the years, this country has imported thousands of Americans, Canadians, South Africans and others to supplement local teachers of English. But the program has strained the government’s budget.

Enter Engkey, a teacher with high standards and a silken voice. She is a little penguin- shaped robot, but symbolically and practically, she stands for progress, achievement and national pride.

What she does not tolerate, however, is bad pronunciation.

“Not good this time!” Engkey admonished a school boy as he stooped awkwardly over her. “You need to focus more on your accent. Let’s try again.”

Engkey, a contraction of English jockey (as in disc jockey), is the great hope of Choi Muntaek, a team leader at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology’s Center for Intelligent Robotics. “In three to five years, Engkey will mature enough to replace native speakers,” he said.

Engkey has a long way to go to fulfill her creators’ dream. The robot can help students practice only scripted conversations and is at a loss if a student veers off script. Dr. Choi’s team recently demonstrated Engkey’s interactions with four young students from Seoul who had not met the robot.

“I love you,” Yang Ui ryeol said to appease Engkey after he was chastised for a bad pronunciation. Engkey would have none of it; it was not in her programmed script. “You need to work on your accent,” the robot repeated.

When the boy said, “I don’t like apples” instead of “I love apples,” as he was supposed to, Engkey froze. The boy patted her and said, “Hello, are you alive or dead?” The trials and errors at the Korea Institute, a wooded top-security compound for the country’s best scientific minds, represent South Korea’s ambitious robotic dreams.

Last month, it announced a trial service for 11 types of intelligent robots this year. They include “robo soldiers” that will man part of the 250-kilometer-border with North Korea with a never-sleeping camera eye, night vision and lethal fire power.

But the most notable step was this country’s plans to use robots as teaching aids. In February, the Education Ministry began deploying hundreds of them as part of a plan to equip all the nation’s 8,400 kindergartens with robots by 2013. Dr. Choi knows the challenge. After tests in more schools this winter, he hopes to commercialize Engkey and to reduce the price, currently $24,000 to $32,000, to below $8,000.

Even though they are little more than fancy toys, experts say, these robots prepare children for a fast-approaching robotic future.

Early this year, when the institute did an experimental run of Engkey , there was a mad rush among children to be selected for the program .

But a n independent evaluator of the trial noticed that Engkey required the constant presence of a technical operator. Ban Jaechun, an education professor at Chungnam National University, said, “Engkey has a long way to go if it wants to avoid becoming an expensive yet ignored heap of scrap metal at the corner of the classroom.”


South Korea plans to equip its 8,400 kindergartens with robots by 2013. Engkey, a robot that recognizes human speech, worked with a student on his English. / CHOE SANG-HUN/THE NEW YORK TIMES