The thing to keep in mind with Pronunciation is that AI is not perfectly developed. It has made leaps and bounds improvements, but context, punctuation and special characters are difficult for it to understand and mimic perfectly.
By Melissa Arndt
Date of Creation: 2023-10-10
Last Update: 2023-10-10
So, here is what we suggest people keep in mind when creating these activities:
1. Be careful with special characters and punctuation.
We use Microsoft for our AI capabilities. However, whatever they decided as the rules for training the AI and whatever input they gave to the knowledge base for it, is what our system will mimic. So these aspects are difficult to understand perfectly as we didn't create "the rules" behind the AI.
In our own content activities, we have these instructions for the students:
(Note: For this activity, artificial intelligence is used to score your pronunciation. Sometimes compound or hyphenated words had to be split up or special characters taken out due to the AI not being able to recognize context or language perfectly.)
2. Times and numbers are the exact same. Sometimes they follow the rule of spelling out the number 0-9, but then do the numeral after 10. However, there does not seem to be a perfect pattern. We see this in one of our activities using ordinal numbers. We have to use 1st, but then spell out second and third. Then "4th" is good, but "fifth" needs to be spelled out.
Therefore it is very important that all teachers who create these activities hit the preview button and try the sentences to see:
A. that the AI is picking up the sentence correctly. If not, then tweak the sentence. (I always say, if you as a teacher cannot get 100%, then you should change the sentence)
B. what the AI is writing out and changing it to match.
Example sentence 1: The check-in line was very long. But the AI writes it out after you try to say it as "The check in line was very long." Then simply take out the - because sometimes it will count it as incorrect then.
Example sentence 2: It is 3:00. But the AI writes it out as "It is 3 o'clock." Change the sentence to this then.
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