Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, educational content providers were able to shape minds and transfer skills at the touch of a button. But in the past few years, eLearning tools have had incredible growth around the world, creating flexible learning opportunities for educators and students alike. But just as eLearning has increased in popularity, so has the desire for better quality, more accessible educational content, with a demand for features such as speech-to-text. 

As a product leader, you want to be certain your EdTech offering is ready to support those teaching the next generation. Here, we’ll look at how Speechmatics’ best-in-class speech recognition can help you deliver an EdTech solution that only gets top marks.

Understanding Every Little Voice

It’s no secret that, historically, speech-to-text has performed poorly when it comes to children’s voices. The obvious difference in pitch, the over-enunciation, the fewer common cadences to adults: these factors all contribute to a failing. But the biggest failure comes from under representation. The models previously used for speech recognition were traditionally trained on adult voices due to limited datasets. The solution? Train on a wider range of speakers.   

And that’s exactly what Speechmatics has done. By introducing self-supervised learning into our training – expanding to broader datasets of voices, accents, and environments– we’ve seen our accuracy improve hugely.  

Now, those under eighteen are finally starting to be understood almost as well as adults. And higher accuracy means a reduction in costs and time wasted reviewing and editing captions. So, for time-strapped educators, this means increasing productivity with fewer hours spent on prepping video content before it can be published.

A Global Solution

Having reduced the gap in accuracy between both children and adults, the next obstacle to overcome was to make sure children from all over the world could be heard and understood. We believe everyone should have the right to access the modern technological world regardless of ethnicity, gender, literacy, disability, or age. To that end, we’ve made sure our language accuracy is market leading.   

We’ve recently added 14 new languages to our language support, taking our total to 50. From Estonian to Ukrainian, from Welsh to Cantonese, we’re incredibly proud of the work we’ve done to make sure many of the world’s children get the same level of support as each other in as many languages as possible – creating a more positive learning environment as we strive towards better access to education for all. 

And, from a product development perspective, advanced language and dialect detection that accounts for a variety of demographics can increase your product’s total addressable market (TAM). Plus, your EdTech Platform can be ready for new markets and accelerate your time to market to take advantage of new, strategic, and proactive opportunities.

Developing Minds

We believe accuracy is everything. That’s never been more important than when educating children. We’ve known that subtitles can play a huge role in helping develop literacy skills for some time now. The more children get to see words in action, the easier it is for them to understand and repeat them. But the opposite can be true for incorrect captions. How badly does it reflect on your EdTech product if the speech-to-text you’re providing to Video Platforms is inaccurate?  

Speechmatics has proven time and again that we’re best-in-class for providing accurate speech-to-text. But we’re also leading the charge when it comes user experience. From reduced editing times to increased video creation speed and helping educators create content that’s easy to consume, we’re always maximizing opportunities to improve user experience.  

By choosing Speechmatics, you’ll give your EdTech offering a great advantage over your competition. Sticking with the status quo and your current vendor risks losing out in the race to provide the best, most inclusive solution you can.

Making the Right Choice

When you’re looking for the right speech-to-text provider, remember what really matters to your customers. As a product leader, you want to be able to deliver a differentiated user experience that addresses the largest market possible, empowering educators and students alike with the right tools. 

Our goal is to make sure your EdTech offering has the right speech-to-text for the market you’re in now and the ones you might want in future. We power some of the top Video Distribution Platforms in the industry, including those who specialize in eLearning and education.  

We recently received a glowing review from Udemy, a video-based learning platform, who said, “having conducted an evaluation of several speech-to-text vendors, we identified one as providing the best quality and soon rolled out automatically generated subtitles for all published English courses on our platform...Two years later, we extended to all Spanish and Portuguese courses. This year, we're adding French, German, Italian and Japanese."  

The chosen vendor? Speechmatics, of course.  

In fact, you can read Udemy’s speech-to-text vendor evaluation on Medium.com. 

When it comes to integration, we make setting up as easy as possible with our 6 simple steps. Book a meeting today with an EdTech specialist, and we’ll give you the tools you need to differentiate your solutions in market and help you deliver on constantly evolving customer expectations.