4 Benefits of Speech to Text for Educators

Being an educator comes with ample rewards and challenges. While instilling knowledge and a love for learning in students can be a fulfilling experience, many educators struggle to enhance the value of their curriculum while simplifying their workloads. Speech technology can be a key solution.

One of the benefits of speech to text (STT) is that it helps students learn; equally important, however, is its ability to help educators teach. Here’s how speech technology can supercharge your curriculum and save you time.

Benefits of Speech to Text for Educators

STT technology isn’t a new concept, but educators are increasingly realizing the value of integrating it into their teaching strategies. Here are four benefits of speech to text in the education sector.

1. Evaluate Student Skills With Greater Accuracy

When taking knowledge and skills assessments, many students struggle with the technical aspects of writing. Some students simplify their verbiage and sentence structures to avoid spelling and grammar issues, while others who struggle with handwriting turn in illegible assignments. When students grow preoccupied with and anxious about fixing their writing weaknesses, they don’t get a chance to demonstrate their full capabilities.

Speech to text helps educators provide more accurate grades and test results without the pressure of technicalities. When students verbally state their answers to a prompt, their STT tool will do the rest — spelling every word correctly, adding punctuation where needed, and more. This allows students to focus on the accuracy and quality of their answers.

Writing teachers can use STT to isolate spelling and grammar assessments from those focused on creativity. Writing with speech technology encourages students to express themselves by jotting down their thoughts as they come and perfecting their narrative structure later. When students start the editing process, they can learn by studying the grammar issues their word processor has already identified.

2. Increase Independence for Students With Disabilities

Students with physical disabilities, learning disabilities, and vision impairments aren’t always able to write or type with ease, if at all. While educators can support these students by helping them with written assignments, this can take time away from other students in your class.

Implementing STT is a simple way to increase independence for students with disabilities. Students can write what’s on their mind at any time with the help of smart speech to text technology, which also empowers them to complete homework assignments without parental assistance.

Allowing students to reap the benefits of text to speech (TTS) — which turns written words into audio — can further help them gain independence. Students with disabilities can review their written work and notes at their own convenience.

3. Make Individualized Education Affordable

Today’s educators have a better understanding of how to educate many different student types than their predecessors. Plus, catering lessons to different learning styles has never been easier thanks to the abundance of ed-tech tools on the market. However, cutting-edge technology is often expensive, especially in public elementary and secondary schools, and tends to appear first in schools that are well-funded.

Fortunately, affordability is one of the core benefits of speech to text (as well as text to speech). When delivered as a service, speech technology can reach more classrooms and more students more quickly. By reducing the impact of funding disparities between schools, STT and TTS can help educators level the playing field for all students.

Once implemented, affordable speech technology can help educators easily create educational materials in different formats, so students can learn and study in a way that suits their preferences.

4. Integrate Pronunciation Practice Into Lessons

Pronunciation is a difficult skill for many students to master. The United States is home to 5 million public school students who are English language learners, as well as plenty more students with speech impediments like stuttering and tongue-tie. Despite this large population of students, it’s not uncommon for pronunciation lessons to take a backseat to grammar and vocabulary lessons — even in ESL classrooms.

Integrating STT into lessons of any subject is a simple way to increase and streamline pronunciation practice in the classroom. When students use STT — whether it’s to compose essays or write messages during an online activity — they get instant feedback on their speech. They can see what word their STT tool picks up based on their pronunciation, so they can identify the words they struggle with.

Pairing STT and TTS technology can further help students improve their pronunciation. One of the benefits of text to speech for students is the ability to listen to unfamiliar words on repeat during their independent study time. Students can repeatedly hear, then practice the words they want to learn, with no direct teacher guidance needed.