Ed-Technical
Join two former teachers - Libby Hills from the Jacobs Foundation and AI researcher Owen Henkel - for the Ed-Technical podcast series about AI in education. Each episode, Libby and Owen will ask experts to help educators sift the useful insights from the AI hype. They’ll be asking questions like - how does this actually help students and teachers? What do we actually know about this technology, and what’s just speculation? And (importantly!) when we say AI, what are we actually talking about?
Ed-Technical
Finding Their Voice: Voice AI for Literacy Support
Voice AI is having a moment in education. As schools grapple with declining literacy scores and stretched teaching resources, voice-enabled tools have the potential to help. But what's already working in real classrooms, and what challenges remain?
In this episode, Libby and Owen speak with Kristen Huff from Curriculum Associates and Amelia Kelly from SoapBox Labs about the emerging field of voice AI for literacy support and assessment. Together they explore how automatic speech recognition technology helps teachers identify reading challenges earlier, provide more frequent assessments, and give students personalized feedback on their oral reading.
They discuss the practical realities of developing and implementing voice AI in education, from navigating noisy classroom environments to building teacher trust in AI-generated assessments.
Links:
- Ed-Technical episode with TeachFX about voice AI and teacher feedback
- Ed-Technical episode with Professor Peter Foltz about voice AI
- Ed-Technical episode with Dr Carmen Strigel about use of voice technology for teacher feedback in low resource settings
Guest biographies
- Kristen Huff, MEd, EdD, currently serves as the Head of Measurement at Curriculum Associates, where she works with a team of assessment designers, psychometricians, and researchers in the development of online assessments integrated with personalized learning and teacher-led instruction. Kristen has deep expertise in k-12 large scale assessment, and has presented and published consistently in educational measurement conferences and publications for over 25 years.
- Amelia Kelly, PhD, is an AI engineer and pioneer in voice technology with more than 15 years of experience in speech recognition and natural language understanding. She is a Fulbright Scholar and Eisenhower Fellow, holding a PhD and master’s in linguistics and speech technology. Amelia currently serves as chief technology officer of SoapBox Labs and vice president of data science at Curriculum Associates, where she leads the development of child-specific speech-recognition technologies.
Join us on social media:
- BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
- Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
- Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
- Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert
Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design