A first grade student is trying to read a passage on her iPad. A digital avatar Amira, clad in olive green, is listening. Her face isn’t particularly demonstrative, but she’s trying her best with emphatic pats-on-the-back when the student gets something right. When the reader skips a word, or mispronounces it, Amira displays the kind of dispassionate instruction that only artificially created avatars can.
“Keep going,” Amira says, softly.
Amira is the invention of Amira Learning, a six-year-old edtech company that fuses voice-based artificial intelligence into reading activities, guided by an eponymous AI bot. Amira Learning is only one of a slew of edtech companies that have leveraged the advancements in voice-based AI to help improve foundational reading skills for learners from kindergarten right up to fourth grade.
