PROMOTING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY BETWEEN INDIA AND THE U.S.
Robotics
Carnegie Mellon University
Project LISTEN (Literacy Innovation that Speech Technology ENables) is an inter-disciplinary research project at Carnegie Mellon University to develop a novel tool to improve literacy – an automated Reading Tutor that displays stories on a computer screen, and listens to children read aloud. To provide a pleasant, authentic experience in assisted reading, the Reading Tutor:
· Takes turns with the child picking stories from Weekly Reader and other sources – including user-authored stories
· Adapts Carnegie Mellon’s Sphinx speech recognizer to analyze the child’s oral reading
· Intervenes when it notices the reader make a mistake, get stuck, click for help, or encounter difficulty
· Gives spoken and graphical feedback based on expert reading teachers, but adapted to the capabilities and limitations of the technology