AI芯視界

A South Korean research team has developed a type of AI teacher that helps students learn English as if they are working with a native speaker. Jeong Eun-joo has more.
A 5th grader in elementary school has an English tutor like no other. It's an AI teacher that evaluates and scores her pronunciation when she reads the text out loud, helps her interpret the passage, and can even correct compositions.
“Read the text. Select the part you wish to learn the meaning of.” “‘Because no one could answer the teacher’s questions except me.’ said Tom.” “Because there are other students at academies, I can’t have one-on-one conversations with the teacher. But the AI teacher reads back to me with a more accurate native pronunciation, so I think it’s better.”
This is the world’s first “AI Reading Teacher” developed by South Korean researchers at ETRI. Students can learn English with the AI teacher as if they are actually having a conversation with a native speaker.
The newly developed technology actually understands the student’s answer and asks the next question accordingly, while offering appropriate feedback, unlike existing technology that can only hold conversations within a set of expected questions and answers. This AI teacher also improved its performance through reinforcement learning with a small amount of training data.
In particular, it showed a recognition rate of 90 percent by learning from data on children’s pronunciation and Korean accents.
“The AI needs to understand the Korean person’s English pronunciation. ETRI's best non-native English speech recognition technology was applied.” The research team is preparing to commercialize this technology by the end of this year.
“We plan to apply the developed technology to Korean and provide Korean language education for foreigners wishing to learn Korean and foreign workers residing in South Korea.”
The developed technology can be used not only for foreign language education, but also for mathematics, history, and job training.
Jeong Eun-joo, Arirang News.