SCIENTIFIC LEARNING READING ASSISTANT™: CMU SPHINX TECHNOLOGY IN A COMMERCIAL EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE APPLICATION Valerie L. Beattie, Ph.D. Scientific Learning Corporation 300 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Suite 600, Oakland, CA 94612 www.scilearn.com
[email protected] ABSTRACT research[6]. However, given public school class sizes and budget constraints, it is not possible for teachers or other The Reading Assistant™ software application is a reading trained professionals to provide sufficient practice with this tutor designed to provide the support and practice needed to kind of one-on-one help and feedback to students while improve reading skills. CMU Sphinx speech recognition they read. Speech recognition technology has the potential technology is used to provide the guided oral reading to fill this gap, but the challenges are also considerable. On experience that is key to building reading fluency and the one hand, the speech recognition software must ability. The application listens and follows along as a accommodate the acoustic variability from a wide range of student reads the displayed text, providing feedback and user ages, accents, reading rates, and noise conditions. At help if the student gets stuck or makes an error. the same time the application must strive to identify In many ways this application of speech recognition ‘undesirable’ variations in the user’s reading of the text, i.e. technology is different from typical commercial reading errors. applications, and we have made many modifications to the The development of the Reading Assistant application CMU Sphinx technology to adapt it to the needs of the began in 2000 with the foundation of Soliloquy Learning, Reading Assistant application.