Learn English

Learn English - HowTo infographic

Inspiration

I am an English teacher and I am always looking for ways to help my students learn. There is never enough time to get everything you need to get done in a lesson and leveraging Alexa is way for my students to practice a skill (they need) independently when I am progress monitoring other students.

What it does

This skill allows young minds to develop their reading and listening skills by using different word family groups in segmentation, deletion and substitution exercises. Segmentation is the process of breaking words into different phonemes and saying each sound. Deletion is the process of getting rid of a certain phoneme in a word and then saying the word without the phoneme. Substitution is the process of replacing a specific phoneme with a different phoneme and saying the new word.

How to use it

To get started, simply say: "Alexa, open Learn English".

The user will then be asked to choose between one of following three types of exercise:

Segmentation: during segmentation, Alexa will say a word and then it is your turn to say each of the sounds in the word.
Deletion: for deletion, you will hear Alexa telling you to delete a sound in a word and you will say the word without that sound.
Substitution: during substitution, Alexa will tell you to replace one sound with a different sound and you will say the word with the new sound.

Additional features:

Finishing up: At any point the user can say "I am done" to let Alexa know you want to say good-bye to Learn English.
Contextual help: just say "help" at any point and Alexa will let you know how to proceed from there!
Say that again...: missed what Alexa just said? No problem, just say "repeat" and Alexa will gladly repeat it for you, just please pay attention this time ;-)
Easter eggs: no, these are not the type of Easter eggs the Easter bunny leaves behind... These are "hidden gems" in the Alexa skill. Can you find them?

How we built it

The Alexa skill is built on the idea of having young minds self assess by practicing English words and hearing the correct pronunciation, without getting shy or frustrated during their learning process due to negative feedback.

Challenges we ran into

Due to the phonetic nature of this project, we ran into the following challenges:

The segmentation exercise could not be completely implemented with Alexa SSML phoneme keyword. Recorded audio was then used to capture the correct segmentation result and the Alexa audio keyword to play this result back.
Alexa recognized some of the exercise responses as utterances of Alexa Skill Kit standard built-in intents (like CancelIntent & StopIntent). Some of these utterances have been identified and proper re-mapped to out internal intents. We continue to monitor user activity to identify such situations and fine tune the skill.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am very excited to be able to go beyond my classroom and reach out to millions of young minds across the country, allowing them to continue improving their listening and reading skills while they are away from their English teachers! It is also exciting to imagine having Echo devices in libraries across the country, where young minds can gather to improve their English skills in a nation of learners!

What we learned

Despite how much Alexa has evolved over the past years, it was interesting to learn about its current limitations and see that findings from this project can contribute to improve it further (e.g. Alexa phoneme treatment). Creativity and perseverance were key to find a suitable solution to overcome such limitations, requiring us to bring together both domain expertise and technical skills of the team to brainstorm and identify the best solutions.

What's next for Learn English

Here are a few areas we are considering working on next:

As user adoption grows, continue to add word families as well as additional words to enrich the learning experience.
Have Learn English available in all other English variations (Canadian, UK, India, Australia) supported by Alexa.
Partner with Amazon ASK team to further enhance the current ASK SSML phoneme capabilities.
We are considering an off-shot of this skill to focus on English as a Second Language learners of all ages.

And of course we would absolutely love to hear about your thoughts/suggestions on how to improve Learn English in the comment section below!