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Recognizing the challenges bilingual children face in school readiness and the potential of bilingual dialogic shared reading in improving language and literacy, this study investigates the use of a bilingual conversational agent (CA) to enhance shared reading experiences in home environments. While current CAs hold promise in fostering young children's learning, they do not typically consider the linguistic and cultural needs of bilingual children and rarely involve parents intentionally. To this end, we developed a bilingual CA, embedded within ebooks, to support children's language learning and parent engagement for Latine Spanish-English bilingual families. A week-long home-based study with 15 families indicated that the bilingual CA elicited a high level of bilingual verbal engagement from children, thereby promoting their vocabulary acquisition. It also stimulated meaningful conversations among parents and children. This study provides design implications for developing CAs for bilingual children and parents. 

Conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly prevalent in children’s lives, serving as educational companions, particularly in shared reading activities. While effective for monolingual children’s learning, there exists a gap in meeting the unique needs of the rapidly expanding bilingual child population, who face dual challenges of school readiness and heritage language maintenance. Moreover, most current CAs, designed for one-to-one interactions with children, neglect the importance of parents’ active participation in shared reading. Our study introduces the development and home deployment of a bilingual CA, integrated within e-books, designed to foster parent-child joint engagement in shared reading, thereby promoting children’s bilingual language development. Results of the study indicated high levels of family engagement in co-reading activities over an extended period, with observable language learning gains in children. This study provides valuable design implications for designing effective and engaging CAs for bilingual families.