Reading Apps
We are developing multiple "reading apps" to be used in smartphones, tablets, or laptops and computers as aids to parents and teachers who are teaching children to read.
Some of these apps may be easy enough for children to interact with directly, but friends, siblings, tutors, parents, or teachers will likely make a child's experience more meaningful, enjoyable and memorable.
We first develop the means to recognize a child's speech, then the capability for an app to speak to the child.
Next we build a way for the child to spell words, by typing on a keyboard. Better still would be for the teacher to oversee the child writing letters and words with paper and pencil. But we find children are very happy to type and watch their names appear on screen.
Once we have speech recognition and a speech synthesizer, we can develop dialogues in which the child can play games like the popular "Speak-n-Spell."
The most important dialog will perhaps be presenting a sentence and asking the child to read it. The computer will then print out what it thinks it heard (recognized).
Ideally, the computer could compare the original sentence with the child's utterance and comment on any differences. But for now the computer might just print out what it recognized, then speak the original sentence itself and ask the child to read it again, hoping for a convergence to the correct pronunciation.
Here are links to the current draft apps...
Speech Recognition
Speech Synthesizer
Speech Recognition and Synthesis
Spell a Word from the Dolch List
Speak and Spell Game
Press and Hold Button While Speaking (To simplify dialog)
Pictures of things - asking the question "What Is It?
Coming soon...
A Talking Keyboard (explaining the multiple sounds of some letters)
A Music Machine (child records tunes and Lesley plays them back)
Segmentation/Phonemes, i.e. C-A-T says CAT
Syllabification, i.s, catwalk > cat-walk.
Coming later?...
Grapheme/Phoneme Alternative Spellings
Handwriting recognition - letter shapes
Simple grammar lessons?
