I N D U S T R Y I N S I G H T
You can play educational games interactively against yourself, against your peers or against Artificial Intelligence. You can also play online or offline, remotely or in the same room.
The best language learning apps also use fun, progressively challenging games, track a user’ s progress, set attainable motivational goals and reward achievement.( In the uTalk app we even test learners more on words or phrases they get wrong).
But there is another side to educational apps. Some of them, like ours, give individual students the chance to work at their own pace during the different learning exercises, letting them repeat those exercises as often as they need and, importantly, giving them the choice of learning content that interests them.( As many of us can vouch from our school days, learning is much harder when you’ re not interested in the subject matter).
Looking into the future, I think it’ s this personalisation of EdTech that will be the one of the next big things. Educators are increasingly aware that we all absorb and respond to new information at different speeds, it’ s called processing time. Importantly slow processing speed doesn ' t equate to lower intelligence because you can be a deep thinker without being a fast thinker. But it does mean some of us need to be given new information at a different rate than others. So it’ s likely that apps will soon be measuring the rate at which individual users learn and then automatically either slowing down or speeding up information delivery depending on a person’ s needs. The‘ one-size-fits-all’ method of learning is definitely on its way out.
So, what are some of the dangers of the use of tech in education? In terms of language learning apps, I’ d say it’ s expecting people to learn a new language by copying computer generated speech rather copying audio from real people. This is happening with at least one of the big players in the industry with the aim of increasing
Call me old-fashioned but I don’ t think AI can ever replace the emotional timbre of a real voice and nor would I want it to. their range of languages and cutting costs. Call me old-fashioned but I don’ t think AI can ever replace the emotional timbre of a real voice and nor would I want it to. At uTalk we’ re committed to supporting languages, particularly minority and endangered ones, and that means supporting the people who speak them as well. So we always work closely with our native speakers
and the days we spend alongside them in the recording studio are some of the best. That’ s when our speakers share their stories with us, not just their language, so we get a real sense of what it means to be part of their culture.
As well as connecting with our native speakers, we also go out of our way to talk to our learners: our language staff go to all the big language learning conferences, our customer service team respond to requests for advice, a staff member replies to online customer reviews and our languages manager keeps a wishlist of all the languages people have asked us to add to our app. I also chat to customers every week because we believe in keeping things real.
So my take-home message to you is that EdTech is a very useful tool but you have to use it rather than let it use you. By that I mean you have to prioritise the human side of language learning over the AI side. For us, that means recording authentic speakers, avoiding ASR and putting our customers at the heart of everything we do. ✓
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