Stottler Henke is developing for the US Navy's Surface Warfare Officers School (SWOS) a new generation of Tactical Action Officer (TAO) Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), interfaced to the Generic Reconfigurable Training System (GRTS). The GRTS TAO ITS allows TAO students to interact naturally using spoken language to command and query simulated entities corresponding to other crew members and off-ship personnel. The TAO supervises the utilization of the ship's sensors and weapons and, in general, fights the ship. The majority of the TAO's decisions are manifested by verbal commands and queries. Therefore the development team is developing the required speech recognition capability to allow the ITS to determine what these decisions are from the spoken words. Those decisions are evaluated for correctness, based on the current tactical situation and performance of other, automated, team members. The TAO's mastery of relevant tactical decision-making principles and ability to apply them in tactical situations is modeled along dozens of dimensions based on the entire history across several scenarios. This student model and the student's immediate performance is used by the ITS to automatically make real-time coaching decisions, assemble a debriefing, choose the next scenario to give the student more practice on his or her weaknesses, and make other instructional decisions.

In the current situation, for simulated scenario practice, one instructor is required for every two students to monitor and evaluate their decisions and to play the roles of other combat team members. The GRTS TAO ITS will be deployed with one instructor for a classroom of 42 students. To allow this, in addition to automating the instructional functions, automated role players (ARPs) to represent the other combat team members are also being developed. The required speech recognition is also being developed for these ARPs so they respond appropriately to the TAO's spoken commands.