What is it like to integrate text to speech tools in education? and how effective learning will be using advanced artificial intelligence? To this day, AI has been a driving force for major industries. People are now leaning towards a more straightforward, time-saving method to go about their work. What better way to do so than using AI. However, when it comes to education, people are still skeptical whether having a text to speech software would be beneficial for students in their learning journey.
Most people advocate the abolition of using text to speech for learning purposes. Part of their argument is that text to speech can help present pieces of information, yet it doesn’t help students actually learn. They believe learning should be done through a good instructor or a trained voice specialist if we were to go about text to speech methods.
It’s important to note that text to speech does not replace learning activities. The original reason professionals are rooting for text to speech in learning is accessibility to content. The technology can be used in many ways according to the needs of every child and adapting to every grade. Overall, it allows students to experience different interactions with texts, other than the traditional way where a professor reads the text aloud and students follow along for example.
The need to have text to speech technology integrated into the education system is more evident now as we have experienced one of the most stressful and unusual times due to covid 19. The pandemic has uncovered many problems within the educational system that could have been easily avoided had they implemented text to speech sooner.
Elearning is the way forward in the 21 century. And as much as it makes education accessible to students in the comfort of their own homes, text to speech can be used as a technique to allow easy understanding of the content remotely.
We also need to consider students with visual and learning disabilities. This particular group struggles most in listening and speaking activities as they require more help and care. Text to speech technology can be used for these students in order to be able to keep on track with the usual speed and quality of learning other students get.
As a matter of fact, some instructors feel the need to introduce such technology to the entire classroom as an added bonus and a helpful learning tool to be used when needed. Some students will prefer to use it occasionally in certain activities, others will prefer to use it during listening class as it helps them focus and understand better than reading. To each its own, therefore it's important to accommodate everyone using a single product.
To understand what makes text to speech efficient in the education industry, it’s important to check what researchers have concluded based on their case studies concerning this matter.
According to one study by the International Conference on Software Development for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion entitled “Use of text-to-speech software to improve reading skills of high school struggling readers”, it was noted that after testing text to speech effects on high school students struggling to read, it was concluded that participants who used text to speech software have significantly improved in reading skills.
The act of hearing the text as opposed to reading it proved to be beneficial for struggling students. Using a text to speech tool to read content out loud was efficient to let students focus on understanding the content rather than focusing on how to read the words. No matter the quality of the voice, even though today’s TTS technology has improved tremendously, they were able to learn better than in the usual reading session.
Other studies specified how students with learning disabilities such as cognitive disabilities, autism, and emotional disabilities have improved their school performance using text to speech. This goes to show that no matter the struggle, limited competence, or uneven opportunities in learning activities, text to speech on its own can definitely help as an initial step to include people with disabilities in the educational system and motivate them to learn.
These results prove that text to speech, an AI technology created initially for the visually impaired and then later used for marketing purposes can now be a core factor for students' learning. It is not necessary to invest in expensive TTS software as there is much text to speech tools at reasonable prices that do the job just right. Students won’t have to worry about spending money each time they want to use the software as most products on the market provide lifetime subscriptions.
Another perk of using text to speech in education is how most tools support different languages and voices. Students can use the technology for all their subjects and even choose what voices they want to hear most. You can also download the content in a voice format using other software and add it to your playlist for easy and swift learning.
Other than helping students read texts easily, text to speech technology can be used in numerous ways to ensure its optimum usage.
Low literacy students have the right to access knowledge as well. The whole purpose of educational activities is for students to access knowledge easily and efficiently. Yet, leaving students with disabilities aside without any learning support is not tolerable. Text to speech can be the answer for struggling students to access content based on their own needs and following their own pace.
Students with reading disabilities may not decipher well, however, they can definitely memorize, analyze, evaluate, comprehend and apply what they learned. They are able to think about what is important in their situation. If a student cannot independently learn a certain notion similar to their classmates, can they still learn it using other ways? They often starve for information and without the proper guidance of professionals, they may lose motivation to even try.
Vocabulary is one of the critical aspects of learning from a young age. Some students are gifted with the fact they can easily understand difficult words easily or through the meaning provided in the sentence. Many other students find this kind of activity exhaustive and brain heavy as they struggle with each word to understand its meaning.
With text to speech technology, students find it easier to remember a word and look it up if it was already articulated for them. They can multitask by listening to the text and looking up the meaning of the word on their own without relying on their instructor. And that’s another factor text to speech helps students with: learning independently.
For students who find it hard to initiate reading texts in the classroom, text to speech technology can help overcome their insecurities. If a student is not confident enough to read a text out loud, they can use TTS to familiarize themselves with the text first and then read it themselves. Once these students feel comfortable in class and with their own reading competence, they can turn off TTS and continue the activity on their own.
Text to speech can also act as an assistive teacher. Some students are reluctant to learn unless they are instructed by their professors on every single matter. It is true that the role of teachers in the classroom is to help students during their learning journey, yet with other external factors, teachers can’t tend to every single student and especially if the group has students with disabilities.
Students need to put an effort into trivial questions and only request help if they find it hard to come up with an explanation on their own and after thorough research. For example, in reading sessions, usually students ask their teacher to spell a certain word or what it could mean in a certain context. By having a text to speech application, they can refrain from these questions as the technology will easily read the text out loud and therefore provide explanations based on the context.
Professional writers often ask other people to read their work before submission. This is not to prove that they don’t know how to read or they can’t check their mistakes themselves. Proofreading is important to be done by a third party in order to look for errors that may not seem important to the writer. The latter is so familiar with the text that even after several reading sessions, the writer won’t be able to distinguish if something needs to be replaced.
Now, in a classroom context, students won’t be able to hand their work to each other as it may encourage cheating. Therefore, the only way to go about this activity is to have text to speech software that can read content aloud which will ease the process of detecting errors.
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