Project LISTEN

Project LISTEN (Literacy Innovation that Speech Technology ENables) is an interdisciplinary research project at Carnegie Mellon University to develop a novel tool to improve literacy through an automated reading tutor.

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

Components of project LISTEN are available now as part of RoboTutor.