Microsoft today created Reading Coach, an AI-powered tool that provides personalized reading practice for learners. Available It’s free to anyone with a Microsoft account.
As of this morning, Reading Coach is available on the web in preview. Windows app coming soon. And soon (in late spring), Microsoft says Reading Coach will be integrated with learning management systems like Canva.
“It’s well known that reading is fundamental to students’ academic success. Research shows that fluent readers are four times more likely to graduate from high school and get a better job. ,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post. “The latest AI technology gives us the opportunity to provide our learners with a personalized, engaging and innovative reading experience.”
Reading Coach is built on Reading Progress, a plugin for Teams for Education, an education-centric version of Microsoft Teams, designed to help teachers accelerate reading comprehension in their students. Inspired (obviously) by the success of Reading Progress, Microsoft launched Reading Coach in 2022 as part of Teams for Education and Immersive Reader, the company’s cross-platform assistance service for language and reading.
Image credits: microsoft
Reading Coach works by identifying learners’ weakest words and presenting them with tools to support independent, individualized practice. Based on educator preferences, available tools include text-to-speech, syllable segmentation, and picture dictionaries.
After learners practice with Reading Coach, educators can see their work, including the words they practiced, the number of attempts they made, and the tools they used. Educators can also share this information with students if they wish.
Reading Coach recently received an improvement in the form of a Choose Your Own Story feature powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service, allowing learners to tap the AI to generate their own narrative adventures.
Similar to the Amazon Echo Show’s AI-generated story tool, Reading Coach’s Choose Your Own Story allows learners to choose characters, settings, and reading levels, and then combines these choices with the learner’s most challenging vocabulary. Let AI create content based on your content. (Microsoft says story content is tailored and filtered for things like “quality, safety, and age-appropriateness.”) Reading Coach provides pronunciation feedback and helps learners read the story. Listen to them read and award badges that unlock new characters and scenes as you progress.
Learners who choose not to create their own stories can choose from a selection of texts from ReadWorks, a library of reading comprehension resources.
“Reading Coach inherently motivates learners to keep improving their skills in a variety of ways,” Microsoft continues. “He believes that using AI in an impactful, safe and responsible way will enable personalized learning at scale.”
It’s important to note that Microsoft’s optimism about AI in reading instruction is not shared by all educators. Experts say there are no reliable tools on the market to measure comprehension. The tool assesses what students know, their vocabulary strength, and whether they can pronounce words out loud. If a student presses the wrong button, it can inadvertently affect the grade. Or they may get bored with the tasks the tool presents and stop working, resulting in a low score.
That being said, teachers don’t think tools like Reading Coach can do that. Hurt. In a recent EdWeek Research Center investigation44% of educators said they believe adaptive technology can more accurately assess student reading levels than non-adaptive software or paper-and-pen methods.