Speech Recognition Technology

Intervention from a Supportive Listener

Scientific Learning® Reading Assistant™ software is a guided oral reading tool to build fluency. By virtue of the speech recognizer, the software listens to students reading aloud. Monitoring for signs of difficulty, which include hesitations, silence, mispronunciations and other cues, the program provides assistance when students stumble or get stuck.

Our “intelligent intervention” patent pending methodology balances the need for support by offering the correct pronunciation of a word against impeding students’ progress by interrupting their reading. When the program detects a student struggling, the Reading Assistant software will intervene by pronouncing the word or phrase. Students can also get help by accessing our vocabulary resources. Key vocabulary terms contain a definition, a context specific sentence, and often a picture clue.

The Reading Assistant software can be adapted to individual needs. The program allows the teacher to set how strictly each student’s pronunciation should be evaluated for correction.

Intelligent intervention is tuned to ensure that students have time to self-correct. The program indicates to students that they missed a word, and allows them to repair before pronouncing the word for them. As a teacher, you can set the amount of time allowed students for repair.

Building the voice profile: customized, personalized, and adaptable

The enrollment process is simple. The software will prompt students to read ten sentences aloud the first time they use the product. Students’ readings will provide the speech recognizer with sufficient information to adapt to their voice and pronunciation. Using the data collected, the software analyzes how students pronounced each word and creates a personal voice profile. The application stores the voice profile and makes it available at any computer!

Speech verification

Unlike traditional speech recognition systems, the Reading Assistant program does not attempt to match the closest word to the user’s utterance but makes sure that students’ pronounced the correct word from the text. Using “speech verification,” our program has achieved impressive accuracy levels.**

**A comparison of the Reading Assistant software's error judgments with those of two reading teachers.

The numbers are based on the oral reading of 349 passages representing 153 children in Grades 2-6.