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SoapBox
Educate

Voice-enable your tools in the service of students and teachers

Reading and comprehension, vocabulary, and times tables. Using voice technology in education makes learning a more rewarding and relatable experience for the modern student, in and beyond the classroom.

Built for kids to use in busy, noisy environments, our voice technology powers your learning tools, apps and platforms delivering levels of accuracy that are independently verified to be on a par with humans. Our voice engine has also been proven to show no bias, mitigating the risks documented in relation to other speech systems.

Built in the service of teachers and students, our voice technology understands every phoneme spoken by a child, regardless of age and academic ability, dialect, or accent. 

Let us help you to automate and scale your assessment, practice, and screening tools and give teachers the extra time and rich data they need to better support individual students.

Use Cases

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Early literacy

Readily available off-the-shelf, our voice engine supports the very earliest stages of language and literacy by encouraging oral practice and invisible and informal assessments of a child’s expressive language skills — from phonological and phonemic awareness to blending and decoding, letter sounds, words, and short sentences.

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Oral reading fluency

Our voice engine supports children through every stage of the reading fluency journey, from phonics to oral reading fluency and comprehension. It accurately assesses pronunciation, words correct per minute (WCPM), as well as reading errors such as insertions, deletions, substitutions, hesitations, and more.

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English language learning

Children learning a new language or who are emergent bilingual can use their voices to do pronunciation assessments and practice, conversations, and comprehension. Our voice engine caters to all stages of the language learning journey, from phonics and letter sounds to fluent conversations.

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Math and science

From counting and word math to speedy times tables and multiple choice science questions, our speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP) can help children to stay engaged and build their confidence around mathematical concepts from a young age.

soapbox educate diagnostic screeners

Diagnostics and screeners

Our voice engine can be used to help automate aspects of screeners — for example, phonemic awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN) activities — which test a child’s ability to quickly name aloud a series of items on a page, such as letters, numbers, and objects. This use case is particularly compelling in the earlier stages of literacy learning when screening can identify students at potential risk for reading and developmental delay in need of early intervention.

Features

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Accurate

Human-level accuracy down to the individual phonemes.

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Flexible & customizable

Many use cases off-the-shelf, partner with us for bespoke solutions.

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Easy integration

Lightweight and low-code API, integrates within hours.

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Online / offline / embedded

Choose your delivery option depending on your use case.

Measurable insights
through voice data

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Real-time feedback for kids

In a voice-enabled educational game, for example, a child will get real-time feedback on how they pronounced a word, phrase, or sentence, which will inform how they progress through the game.

soapbox educate data actionable insights
Actionable insights for educators

Teachers or educators receive rich and granular data on a child’s reading progress. This data populates their teacher dashboards and offers data in real-time and over time for benchmarking students and flagging where early interventions may be needed.

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Longitudinal data for researchers

Researchers can use our voice data to identify patterns and trends and to understand the longer term impact tools and approaches are having on a child as they progress on their literacy journey. 

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why add voice technology to your learning tools, platforms, and products?

Considering voice-enabling your educational tools for kids? Here are just some of the reasons household brands like McGraw Hill and education pioneers like Amplify have committed to voice for their preK-12 suites of learning tools: 

  • Voice technology offers kids an interactive learning experience that is more relatable to them inside and beyond the modern classroom.
  • SoapBox’s voice engine has been built in the service of teachers and students. With automated assessments powered by our voice technology, teachers remain at the center of the teaching and supporting experience for their students.
  • Accurate, unbiased voice technology like ours provides a level playing field for kids of all accents and dialects and across all grades preK-12 in mainstream and supplemental programs.
  • Voice technology automates reading, language, and math assessments, making them more informal, invisible, and easier to administer at scale, giving teachers the extra time and data they need to personalize their instruction and support of individual students.
  • Voice technology offers teachers and school districts a new category of rich data sets with which to assess, pinpoint, and intervene to support a student with challenges. 
  • Voice technology also provides education and edutainment companies with the immediate and longitudinal data they need to design and build more effective learning tools for children of all abilities and ages. 

Voice technology can support teachers in the areas of special education. Read more in this recent article with CEO Dr. Martyn Farrows.

Does SoapBox’s voice engine handle all accents and dialects?

Imagine a voice system in a classroom that responds accurately to half of the students but misunderstands the accents and dialects of the other half. An experience like this has huge negative implications for individual kids and deepens issues of equity and bias in the classroom and far beyond. 

Voice technology in the preK-12 classroom must understand all students equally and objectively. SoapBox has set the benchmark for accuracy in speech recognition software for children, and that includes catering to globally diverse accents and dialects. 

Our acoustic models are trained on kids’ accents and dialects from 193 countries, and can accommodate unique or custom pronunciations for any population. The SoapBox voice engine has been independently validated to show no bias across race, accent, and socioeconomic backgrounds. (Search “Accuracy” in our FAQ for more information on clients’ independent evaluations of our voice engine.)

To learn more about how our voice engine delivers accuracy for preK-12 education, fill in our Get Started form, and we’ll be in touch to schedule a call. 

How do voice-enabled products help teachers and students?

Whether used in reading practice, language learning, math or science, remotely or in the classroom, voice-enabled learning tools, designed specifically with preK-12 students in mind, can provide students, their parents, and their teachers with accurate, real-time feedback on their learning. Our voice engine prompts, listens, corrects, and encourages the student as they read aloud, answer a multiple choice question, or call out their times tables. 

For teachers, the data points generated by speech recognition tools populate their teacher dashboards and can provide immediate and longitudinal behanmarking on individual student’s progress, help eliminate assessment bias, and enable them to personalize their instruction and interventions more than ever before.

Does SoapBox’s voice engine work in noisy classrooms?

Yes it does! Our voice engine was built using noisy data sets and designed to understand kids’ speech in real-world environments like playgrounds, kitchens, and classrooms. No need for headsets and mics!