Equity in Voice Technology

June 24, 2020

Rectangle Circle

Equitable voice technology should be a non-negotiable.

However, according to Stanford University’s FairSpeech project, all five of the leading speech recognition tools misunderstand “Black speakers twice as often as white speakers.”

SoapBox Labs’ partners at the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) have also shared their concerns about technology and issues of equity in this recent Smart Brief article.

Dr. Yaacov Petscher and his FCRR colleagues are using our voice technology to develop next generation literacy assessments and, to date, are seeing no bias in how our speech recognition performs with diverse accents and dialects.

SoapBox Labs takes equity very seriously. From the beginning, we committed to delivering a kid-specific voice technology to market that could cater to the diversity of accents and dialects you’d find in, say, a New York City K-6 classroom.

We committed to a solution that accurately supports every child on their individual reading and English language learning journey.

And we committed to a solution that can invisibly and continuously assess every kid’s reading progress, prompting early intervention where it’s needed.

On our Educate page, learn more about how our voice technology helps students develop their literacy, oral reading fluency, and language learning skills.

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