Scottsdale, Ariz. APRIL 19, 2022 – Imagine Learning, whose literacy solutions are used by millions of students across the U.S., today announced a new partnership with SoapBox Labs, the Dublin-based speech recognition company that powers joyful learning and play experiences for kids. Beginning this summer, Imagine Learning’s Language & Literacy program will include Fluent Reader+, a new tool powered by SoapBox’s voice technology, giving educators a seamless, scalable and more accurate approach to assessments of students’ reading and language learning progress.   Voice-enabled tool ..read more

Here’s your April roundup from the world of voice technology for kids. Let’s dive right in! This month: An introduction to MLOps and how we’re applying it at SoapBox, our upcoming webinar with MetaMetrics, 5 key takeaways from our March panel, new engineering roles, and more! MLOps: Benefits, Principles, and Applications At SoapBox Labs, machine learning (ML) is at the core of our voice technology. But deploying an ML model that gives customers (or end-users) meaningful insights is often challenging. In this latest SoapBox Tech Blog, Senior Software Engineer Arnaud Letondor introduces us ..read more

By Arnaud Letondor, Senior Software Engineer Introduction At SoapBox Labs, machine learning (ML) is at the core of our technology. All of our speech solutions rely, in one way or another, on ML models that are the result of hours of training. Experimenting with ML and producing models has been made easier over time with the emergence of new technologies and frameworks such as TensorFlow, Keras, Pytorch, and others.  But the journey of an ML model doesn’t stop once it has been trained, and deploying a model so that customers (or end-users) get meaningful insights from it is often challeng ..read more

Last week, an expert panel of education executives and advocates gathered to discuss the potential of voice technology to transform preK-12 reading instruction and assessment.  The panelists included: Kai-leé Berke, Co-Founder of Noni Educational Solutions, Early Childhood Expert and Author Ralph Smith, Managing Director of The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading Rose Else-Mitchell, President of Education Solutions, Scholastic  Martyn Farrows, CEO of SoapBox Labs Tony Wan, Former Managing Editor of EdSurge and Head of Investor Content of Reach Capital  And the verdict? Ralph Smit ..read more

DUBLIN, Ireland & DURHAM, NC  – March 21, 2022 – MetaMetrics®, developer of the widely adopted Lexile® Framework, and SoapBox Labs, provider of specialist speech recognition technology for kids, today announced a partnership to automate the evaluation of oral reading fluency for students preK-12 using voice-enabled assessments. The Lexile Framework for Oral Reading measures the oral readability of a text based on Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM) but also uniquely takes into account the difficulty of the passage the student is tested on. With this new partnership, the time-consuming man ..read more

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from our Dublin-based team! It’s time to get your Irish on.  It’s no secret that the Irish have very distinct accents that are loved the world over. But have you ever paid close attention to some of the slight differences between the American English and Irish English pronunciations of common words? To give you a quick tutorial on how to sound Irish today, the linguists on our Speech Tech team chose their five favorite words with different pronunciations in America and Ireland and shared the phoneme breakdowns for each.  Have some fun and say the words out lou ..read more

Here’s your March roundup from the world of voice technology for kids. Let’s dive right in! This month: Read about how short sounds and markup features enhance the accuracy and efficacy of our voice engine when powering reading tools, the latest tech and privacy headlines in the kids’ space, our webinar on March 15, new roles at SoapBox, and more.  Assessing short sounds with speech technology Learning letter names and sounds is a crucial first step of learning to read. In this latest SoapBox Tech Blog article, Mauro Nicolao and Siva Reddy Gangireddy ex ..read more

By Lora Lynn O’Mahony and Niall Mullally If you read “1881”, how would you pronounce it?  Perhaps “eighteen eighty one” if it’s a year, “one thousand eight hundred eighty one” if it’s an amount, or “one eight eight one” if it’s part of a phone number. From this one example, it’s evident that words and sentences can be ambiguous when they’re in a text format, and even when spoken, too. But in a conversation, a person can clarify the meaning of an ambiguous word or phrase by simply asking.  In speech technology, where we’re dealing with audio recordings, it’s not possible to ask for cl ..read more

By Mauro Nicolao and Siva Reddy Gangireddy Foundational literacy skills start with letter naming, phonics, and phonemic awareness. These are universally accepted as critical building blocks for future literacy and learning skills. Children are developing language skills from birth, learning sounds, structure, and association of sound to objects, but the formal step to literacy starts when children start to establish the link between sounds and their written symbols.  A child’s level of phonological awareness at the end of their first year in school is a strong indicator of their future re ..read more

For International Women’s Day 2022, we asked our SoapBox colleagues to share their reflections on what IWD means to them. Here are some of the responses we received: I see IWD as a way for both women and men to celebrate women, their amazing achievements, and also to shine a spotlight on the areas where there is still a gender bias. Alanda Corcoran, Senior Sales Operations Manager For me, International Women’s Day is about my daughter growing up in a world where her gender is never a limitation to her aspirations. Martyn Farrows, CEO International Women’s Day can have a differe ..read more