Descrizione del progetto
Un’applicazione multilingue per migliorare le capacità di lettura dei bambini
Nonostante l’alfabetizzazione sia un’abilità fondamentale, 2 bambini su 10 nell’UE continuano a fare fatica a leggere. I bambini svantaggiati e immigrati incontrano difficoltà ancora maggiori, con un ulteriore ritardo nelle loro capacità di lettura. L’urgenza di affrontare questo problema è accresciuta dal fatto che il multilinguismo è sempre più vitale nel nostro mondo globalizzato. Il progetto SpeechTech4Literacy, finanziato dall’UE, intende utilizzare la tecnologia vocale per rivoluzionare l’alfabetizzazione digitale e le applicazioni per l’apprendimento delle lingue. Consentendo a queste applicazioni di ascoltare e valutare i bambini mentre leggono ad alta voce, il progetto fornirà un feedback in tempo reale e una guida personalizzata per migliorare le competenze linguistiche e di lettura. La piattaforma di SpeechTech4Literacy è progettata specificamente per i bambini. Sebbene al momento sia disponibile solo in inglese, il progetto prevede di espandere la piattaforma a 13 lingue.
Obiettivo
Literacy is a foundational skill, yet 20% of EU children have difficulty reading, unchanged over the past decade. This problem is more serious for disadvantaged and immigrant children, who lag even further behind in reading skills. Multilingualism is both a needed and desired skill across the globe.
Speech technology has the potential to be a game changer by voice enabling digital literacy and language learning apps to ‘listen’ (and assess) as the child reads aloud, providing the child individual real-time feedback to rapidly improve reading and language skills and track student progress and difficulties.
Adult speech technology systems don’t work for children and existing commercial systems for children are predominantly English and only work in quiet ‘lab-like’ environments, severely limiting their real-world use. SoapBox Labs (SBL) has developed a children's speech assessment platform for real-world conditions such as homes and schools and made the platform available for open license into 3rd party digital learning products, maximising potential for market penetration and impact.
Our ambition is to extend our existing English platform, scaling to 13 languages by 2022 and targeting a global market of 187M children, €3B opportunity.
SBL closed a €1.2M fundraise in Jan 17 and has received widespread support from leading academics, educators and industry stakeholders. SBL’s innovations will have a positive impact on children (through robust, widely accessible and affordable products), industry stakeholders (opening new product channels for education publishers, EdTech companies and developers) and SBL (international expansion with estimated revenues of €33M in 2022; 83 direct/indirect jobs).
The project provides a major achievable step toward raising stagnant EU children’s literacy levels, reaching children no matter where they are, on everyday consumer mobile devices, opening a portal to learning and empowerment, particularly for the most vulnerable.
Campo scientifico
- social scienceseducational sciencesdidactics
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementbusiness models
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learningdeep learning
- social sciencessociologydemographyhuman migrations
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputational intelligence
Programma(i)
Invito a presentare proposte
Vedi altri progetti per questo bandoBando secondario
H2020-SMEINST-2-2016-2017
Meccanismo di finanziamento
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinatore
8 DUBLIN
Irlanda
L’organizzazione si è definita una PMI (piccola e media impresa) al momento della firma dell’accordo di sovvenzione.