In its latest pursuit to harness artificial intelligence (AI) for the future of education, Microsoft has announced that its AI-based Reading Coach tool is now freely accessible to any individual with a Microsoft account.
This tool, which offers a personalised and immersive reading practice experience, could be accessed on the web since yesterday in a preview mode, whereas a dedicated Windows app is still expected. Microsoft also shared its plans to integrate Reading Coach with other well-known learning management systems such as Canva, which will happen in the late spring.
As per Microsoft’s statement in a recent blog post, the importance of reading proficiency for academic prosperity is widely acknowledged. Fluent readers are four times as likely to finish high school and secure superior employment opportunities. By leveraging cutting-edge AI technology, the tech giant believes that it can deliver personalised, engaging and transformative reading experiences to learners.
Introduced in 2022, the Reading Coach was essentially an upgraded version of Reading Progress, a plug-in designed for the education-focused edition of Microsoft Teams, named Teams for Education. The plug-in’s purpose was to assist teachers in promoting reading proficiency among their students. The inspiration behind launching Reading Coach came from the success of Reading Progress, and the tool was made a part of Teams for Education and Immersive Reader, Microsoft’s cross-platform aid for language and reading understanding.
Reading Coach functions by allowing learners to identify challenging words and equipping them with tools to aid independent, personalised practice. Depending upon an educationist’s choices, these aids may include text to speech, picture dictionaries, and syllable breaking.
Post-practice through Reading Coach, educators can review learners’ work, including the words that were practiced, the tools that were used and the number of attempts made. They can also choose to share this information with their students. Recently, Reading Coach was enhanced by adding a “choose your own story” feature, which is powered by Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service, enabling learners to use AI in shaping their own narrative adventure.
The new feature of Reading Coach is similar to the AI-generated story construction tool available on Amazon Echo Show. For creating their “choose your own story”, learners need to select a character, setting, reading level, and the AI then forms content based on these choices and the learner’s most problematic words. Microsoft has assured that the story content is thoroughly examined and filtered with respect to aspects like quality, safety, and age appropriateness. Reading Coach then provides feedback on pronunciation, listens to the learner deliver the story, and awards badges that unlock new characters and scenes with learner’s progress.
Alternatively, learners who do not wish to construct their own story can select curated passages from ReadWorks, a resource library for reading comprehension.
Highlighting the role of Reading Coach, Microsoft stated that the tool internally motivates learners to continuously improve their skills. With the responsible and safe utilisation of AI, Microsoft believes that widespread personalised learning is achievable.
As tools like Reading Coach become widely accessible, they create opportunities for platforms such as AppMaster that aim to bring no-code solutions to every user. Known for its robust No-code development platform, AppMaster allows users to create web, mobile, and backend applications with zero coding expertise. The rise of AI-piloted educational tools is a testament to the fact that the era of personalised, resource-efficient solutions is here.
