The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Manager, Voice of the Customer, Hayley Browning.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Voice Technology with Amelia Kelly
The power of voice technology in education lies not just in its convenience, but in its ability to understand every child, regardless of accent, dialect, or background. In this enlightening conversation with Amelia Kelly, VP of Data Science at Curriculum Associates and head of AI Labs, we explore the fascinating intersection of linguistics, artificial intelligence, and childhood education.
Amelia explains why standard voice AI systems fail many students - they're built on limited datasets of adult voices, leaving diverse children's voices misunderstood or ignored. Beyond accuracy, Amelia emphasizes the critical importance of data privacy and security in educational voice technology.
Amelia goes on to explain how voice AI respects teachers' time and expertise. Rather than adding to educators' workloads, effective voice AI should seamlessly integrate into existing tools, providing valuable insights that allow for more personalized instruction.
Ready to explore how voice AI can transform your classroom experience? Listen to Amelia's episode today!
Hi Amelia, welcome to today's episode of the Extraordinary Educators podcast. Hi, hayley, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you, we're so happy to have you, amelia. I would love to kind of kick things off with a little bit of background about who you are, how you ended up where you are today. So if you could go ahead and take it from there, we'd love to get things rolling.
Amelia Kelly :Absolutely, it's been a bit of a strange journey to get things rolling. Absolutely, it's been a bit of a strange journey. I'll start at the end. So I'm currently VP of Data Science at Curriculum Associate and I head up what is now known as of last week officially launched AI Labs, which is the AI innovation department of Curriculum Associates. So this is where we use our AI expertise to build prototypes and try out new ideas, all with the mission of making teachers' lives easier for harnessing the latest technology to build new and innovative products and to make sure that everything that we're building with this new technology isn't focused on the hike, but is instead focused on teachers, students and actually moving the needle for children and their education journey.
Amelia Kelly :So how did I get here? Um, I started off um oddly, with a degree in astrophysics, but I always had interest in linguistics as well. I went on to do a master's and a PhD in linguistics and speech technology, where I basically got my hands dirty with computers, teaching them how to speak human language and understand human language. My first job out of college was in Silicon Valley, where I worked for a startup and we were doing things like building Lms, which people know about now but didn't really know about uh 10 11 years ago. Um, I also worked for ibm watson same kind of stuff.
Amelia Kelly :You know we're all very familiar with the mission now from using gpt and similar llms, um, but back then it was very much, um, you know, basic research going on and, um, really my career in education, in children's speech recognition and AI in that regard, started when I joined the Soapbox Labs company as a startup back in 2015.
Amelia Kelly :And as one of the first employees of that company, I worked very closely with my still current team mate and we built what has become known as the soapbox speech engine, which still exists today. In 2023, in November, we were absolutely honoured to become a part of the Curriculum Associates family. We went from a position where we had a speech engine that could plug into different products that different companies had to being the speech engine that powers iReady, and over the last 18 months, we've been working really hard to integrate our voice technology into the already stellar product of CA and making it useful in a way that's seamless and actually has impact on the children's learning outcome. So, yeah, that's who I am, that's why I'm here and delighted to tell you more about my thoughts on AI in the classroom.
Hayley Browning:Thanks so much, amelia. It's really wonderful to hear your background and how you got to where you are today, and, especially with this angle and importance of the teachers and the students and at the forefront, it's very clear that you have an end goal, and so we always appreciate that here. So, amelia, you also wrote an incredible blog, which we'll make sure to put in the show notes, and this blog centers around this idea of voice AI, and so I'd love to tap into some of that today. So, to kick things off, let's dive into question number one here, amelia. So there's a lot of power behind voice AI correct, absolutely, and a lot of that also can help support students' literacy development. But in your blog, you mentioned that there is this catch that needs to be considered when looking into these tools. So I'm wondering can you explain why it's important for voice technology to specifically understand children's voices?
Amelia Kelly :Yes, and I can do it in a really long-winded way, and I can do it in a really long-winded way between something like a voice recognition engine and other types of computer programs is that voice recognition is artificial intelligence and all that means is that it learns by example. So when I started building these systems, I think 15 years ago, the only data available to build with were British children with British accents, or else you know a very small amount of data from Californian men, white men, and if you built a system using these as the inputs, you're essentially telling a computer that this is what the world looks like. Make a model of this and if you hear a voice again, try and match it to something that you already built in this model. So if you are a child or if you are a person of color and you are a woman, you come and talk to these systems and it goes hey, I don't understand you. I've never heard anything like this before.
Amelia Kelly :So from the get-go at Soapbox Labs we knew A that children's voices were very, very different from adults' voices. It's a different acoustic signal E that children behave differently from adults. They don't try and make themselves clear and understood in the same way that adults do, and C, they are working in very, very different environments. They are in classrooms and they're in noisy kitchens, and they're trying to get work done in places where there might be competing noise levels. And, um, I suppose another thing in that area as well is that they're doing activities and exercises related to education. They're not just dictating a letter, for example. They might be practicing their letter sounds, or they might be trying to practice reading a passage and need feedback on their oral reading fluency, or the teacher might need that feedback. So, um, it's very, very important if you want children from all walks of life, with all different accents and dialects, in every stage of learning, completing any type of literary or numeracy activity in any kind of noise environment, to be understood equally.
Amelia Kelly :Our aim is to build technology that works just as a teacher would if they were sitting beside the child. So if a dog barks in the background, the teacher isn't going to say, well, I don't know what you said. They will actually be able to filter out those things. So we built an AI system based on really diverse data from children all over the world, of all different ages, and we made that our proprietary data set to build our in-house system. So when you are using the Soapbox speech engine through curriculum associate products, you can be sure, absolutely sure, that none of those children's voices are going to another company. They're not being heard by anyone else. It's a closed system. It's a closed loop. If you are safe and secure in the knowledge that the children's test results and reading results are staying secure within the CA system, you can be assured that their biometric data, their voices, are just the same within that system as well.
Hayley Browning:That's really powerful, amelia. I've you know it's not something that I had necessarily thought about how we need to be strategic, about what student voices are and how we are prioritizing those, and I I've used to be a classroom teacher, so I definitely know that experience of oh yeah, there's, you know, a student over here sharpening a pencil, there is somebody over here stapling their worksheets and you are constantly kind of pulling and turning your ears off, honing in on that one student. So the fact that we can provide this is so, so powerful. Amelia, I am curious. You had started talking about this idea of security and making sure that we are protecting these students. So, for teachers that may be listening, do you have any recommendations for steps that teachers should look for or things that teachers should look for to ensure that these voice AI tools they're using are genuinely protecting their students and complying with regulations and protecting their privacy?
Amelia Kelly :Yeah, I think the best thing that a teacher can do if they're considering using a product that does have AI in it is to look at who is providing that AI, and generally you can find that out in the privacy policy. If it says that they will share the data given with a third party, that could be anyone, that could be OpenAI, it could be Google Maybe I shouldn't be naming names, but let's say it could be A technology company that has a competing business model. I think this is the crux of the matter. At Soapbox, we purposely built a company in competition with some of these massive multinationals because we wanted the only thing we were selling to be a voice engine that helps kids. So any bit of data that comes in is used anonymously to make that engine better.
Amelia Kelly :If you are working with a company that has a competing business model, they may be giving you voice recognition capability, but they are also. That's not how they're making the money. They're not charging you for it. In that way, the more voices you give them, the more fodder they have for profiling children and seeing what they like and seeing what you can sell to them, because their business model is to get money from advertising. That is how those companies make their revenue. So follow the money is the advice I would give to teachers.
Hayley Browning:Thank you, amelia. And jumping off of that a little bit, as I had mentioned, I was a teacher. We definitely have a lot of teachers listening to this podcast, whether that be on their you know their commute in the mornings or as they're, you know, maybe doing the dishes after school, things like that and we know how busy these teachers are in their regular day to days. They are constantly getting things added onto their plates and just doing all of the things, and the thought of taking on a new platform can seem daunting for these teachers, especially knowing all the things that they already are doing in their day to day. And I'm curious how can these voice AI tools help support teachers and give them some of this time back, rather than giving them an additional thing to work through?
Amelia Kelly :I I totally feel that. Now I am not saying my workload is anything like a teacher, and I just want to take that my mom is a retired teacher. I know my friends who are primary school teachers, as we say in Ireland, and the amount of work on the plate of a teacher is absolutely phenomenal. I think that teachers are the most important people in society. They're shaping the next generation. They're shaping what the world is looking like, is going to look like next, and I have you know I will fight tooth and nail not to give them another thing to have to deal with. So the idea of them having to take on a whole new platform to plug something into something else, no, I think that voice interaction is something that should be taken on by the companies who are making the product. So the teacher will wake up one morning and turn on the thing they already use and then suddenly there'll be another feature in it that makes their lives easier use, and then suddenly there'll be another feature in it that makes their lives easier. That's the way I want to go about it.
Amelia Kelly :At the moment when we are asking kids to maybe use a mouse or a trackpad or a keyboard or a drag and drop situation. You're really asking them to use technology that is being phased out. By the time they're grown-ups and their children are growing up, they're going to be digital natives in a completely different sense, and sometimes I wonder that if we are assessing children, we're really assessing their ability to use a keyboard rather than their ability to actually read a word or answer a math question. So I think that voice is another natural interface. It's a matter of computer user experience.
Amelia Kelly :The technology needs to be there. That's my job. The user experience needs to be there to incorporate it into a product that is already used and trusted by teachers, and when that's done, then the teacher will just have better data. They will be able to see when a child is practiced. They will be able to see whether a child has gotten certain words correct or incorrect. With our technology, you will also be able to see whether a child is systematically perhaps under articulating or mispronouncing a particular letter, and it gives a teacher the chance to intervene at the right point with the right students at the right time, and I think that is the vocation of the teacher. That's really what they are wanting to do with their career, and instead what's happening is that they're getting bogged down in admin. So I'm a big fan of not giving them another piece of technology to deal with, but just upgrading what they already use and trust, so it gives them more information and allows them to do what they do best, which is to teach children.
Hayley Browning:Agreed 100%, and this idea that you are giving them the space to really do what they want to do and giving them the opportunity to give those students what they need right in that moment, it really will fulfill a lot of these teachers. I know there were many days for me where I there were so many things that I wanted to do and I just didn't have the capacity, and so the fact that we can provide and make it just that much more doable for teachers is so powerful. So thank you, Amelia. And with that, Amelia, I think we are good to go to wrap up for today. So just wanted to say thank you so much for your time and we are so happy to have you on the Extraordinary Educator podcast.
Amelia Kelly :Thank you, haley. Thank you so much for inviting me on. It's a real honor. Thank you, of course.