AI for Accessibility: Improving reading fluency

Practicing pronunciation and getting timely feedback are essential for improving language skills. The assessment is conventionally driven by experienced teachers, which normally takes a lot of time and big efforts, making high-quality assessment expensive to learners. Pronunciation Assessment, a feature of Speech in Azure Cognitive Services, and a novel AI driven speech capability, is able to make language assessment more engaging and accessible to learners of all backgrounds, making it possible to practice and improve their pronunciation so that they can speak and present with confidence. Educators can also use this capability to evaluate pronunciation of multiple speakers in real time. This will be demonstrated during the session by creating a mobile application that implements the pronunciation assessment capabilities.