Akexa, it’s story time
Amazon product may be used to help kids learn — if it can get over privacy concerns
Amazon product brings voice assistant to the classroom in literacy push.
The group of kids, aged 7 to 12, sat around a table, trying to follow along with the reading assignment. It was after lunch. Energy was high, attention spans short.
Nobody held books, though. And a teacher wasn’t reading.
Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa was conducting story time, queuing up professional narrators to read the story aloud, quizzing the kids in its robot voice and offering hints when someone flubbed an answer to questions about “Davy Duck’s Grumpy Day.”
Voice software has colonized smartphones, car dashboards and the living room. If the technology follows the trail blazed by tablet and cloud computing, the next
frontier may be the classroom.
That’s why Irina Fine convened the group of primary school students to test the latest iteration of the educational voice software built by her startup, Bamboo Learning Inc. “There is a preference for voice with the younger generation,” Fine says. “It’s hard to imagine for it not to be everywhere.”
Founded by Fine and Ian Freed, a former Amazon executive who helped introduce Alexa to the world, Bamboo has appropriately Amazon-size ambitions.
“Our goal is to build a company that is the leader in voice-powered education,” Freed says.
To get there, Bamboo will have to prove its product isn’t a gimmick and stand out from a crowd of competitors trying, many with limited success, to build a busi ness on top of software best known as a digital trivia machine and music box.
Convincing parents that Alexa is an appropriate education tool for kids could be tricky. Amazon’s voice assistant has been caught up recently in debates about privacy in the digital age. Bloomberg reported in April that human listeners review some Alexa voice recordings. Meanwhile, a coalition of advocacy groups accused Amazon of violating a kid’s privacy law with its smart speakers. Amazon says it complies with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.
Boosters of voice technology will also have to make their case to educators, some of whom are already reeling from heated debates about whether the use of gadgets in the classroom is helping kids learn or simply diverting resources from school district budgets to the likes of Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
A few months after leaving Amazon in 2017, Freed called his Fine, whom he’d known since the early 1990s, to disidea cuss an for a startup.
In the last year, Bamboo launched three Alexa skills, as Amazon calls voice apps. They’re short lessons and quizzes on music theory, math and reading. All are designed to work with Amazon devices such as the Echo Show and Fire TV Cube, which let Alexa make use of visual aids, in addition to voice-only gadgets. A fourth skill went live on Wednesday: a storybook program in partnership with Highlights for Children, the 73-year-old children’s magazine.
A focus group, held in Fine’s Brooklyn home on a rainy Saturday, tested out an early version of that software. The program reads aloud condensed versions of stories a few sentences at a time. After each passage, Alexa’s voice chimes in to ask questions.
The kids, comfortable with tablets at home and school, weren’t regular voice software users. Still, they seemed at ease navigating through the voice prompts taking them through stories like “Balto” and “the Three Little Pigs.”
The technology left something to be desired.
Often, the interaction was spot on. But sometimes a kid would answer correctly, only to be greeted with a “that’s not quite right,” owing to their pronunciation or word order. There was an awkward delay between a kid’s response and Alexa’s verdict on the answer as Amazon routed the interaction through the digital plumbing of its cloud.
“We’re doing the best we can with the technology,” Fine says. It doesn’t matter if isn’t perfect yet, she adds. “We want to be there first.”