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.
We hope to develop ten or more apps that would all be available from a single home page.
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. It's a difficult challenge to develop a user interface simple enough for a beginning reader to navigate!
We first must develop the means to recognize a child's speech, then the capability for an app to speak to the child.
Next we will 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 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 requires a click to start listening. When the speech stops, the app displays the text that it heard and asks the user to speak again.
In Speech Synthesizer, the user types in text and then asks to hear it spoken. Alex is the first in the list of possible synthesized voices.
Speech Recognition and Synthesis will offer various sentences (in the sample, THE CAT IS ON THE MAT), and speak that sentence at various speeds - the slowest may be most clear for a young child.
Spell a Word from the Dolch List will pronounce a random word from Dolch lists from Pre-Primer to Third grade and ask child to spell it..
Coming soon...
An app that compares what a child says word-for-word with a target text, reports incorrect words in yellow type, pronounces the target test and asks the child to read it again with correct words. See readingwithphonics.org/dialog3/.
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?
