How Multilingual AI Voice Tools Improve Learning Outcomes

Text to speech (TTS) instantly reads written content out loud. No wonder the technology shows up on so many 504 and individualized education plans (IEPs).

After all, TTS is a key accommodation for many students with disabilities. It removes learning barriers for students with vision impairments, dyslexia, learning disabilities, and attention deficits, for example.

As Marisha Marks learned when her institution adopted ReadSpeaker TTS tools, however, speech synthesis isn’t just useful for students with disabilities. When you combine top-quality AI voices with digital translation tools, you get TTS that improves learning outcomes for another set of vulnerable students: non-native speakers of the dominant language.

Marks is an instructional designer at Springfield Technical Community College, where she specializes in Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Her organization uses two multilingual AI voice tools: ReadSpeaker and Anthology Ally.

“We first acquired ReadSpeaker tools for accommodations. But the uses I found are so much broader. When we show faculty TTS with translation, the reaction I get is just a jaw drop.”
—Marisha Marks, Instructional Designer

This is the story of how Marks—and other instructional designers like her—are already using multilingual AI voice tools to improve learning outcomes across the board. So what might AI translation and TTS do for your students?

5 Ways Multilingual AI Voice Tools Help Students Succeed

Springfield Technical Community College is a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), and the only technical community college in Massachusetts.

“We have a large population of students for whom English is not their first language,” Marks said. Among the 4,500 students typically enrolled in a given semester, many speak Spanish, Arabic, Ukrainian, or Vietnamese at home.

Still, the bulk of the course content appears in English. That includes textbooks, PDF articles, and—crucially—student interactions within LMS chat apps. Language support is a prerequisite to success for student populations with diverse native languages.

Multilingual AI voice tools provide this language support. In so doing, they can:

1. Improve inclusion for non-native English speakers.

Marks works with faculty to help them support their students. She recalled a faculty member who was having trouble communicating with an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) student, even during private tutoring sessions.

“The student was having a hard time even understanding spoken language,” Marks said. “The instructor and I talked about all the different ways she could help that student, whether it was AI captions in Zoom or getting into the LMS and showing the language translation and TTS options.”

These TTS/translation tools allow ESL learners to consume technical course materials in their native languages. That way, they can focus on learning complex concepts, not struggling with English.

Course materials are important. To truly include every student, however, institutions must provide language tools for online discussions, assignments, and assessments, too.

ReadSpeaker’s multilingual AI voice tools function across LMS modules. That includes student chat groups and assessment platforms. It’s comprehensive language assistance, not just a tacked-on app in a digital textbook.

These capabilities promote a more inclusive learning environment. They ensure that all students can engage with the curriculum—and with instructors and other students—regardless of language proficiency.

2. Speed up language acquisition.

Even without AI-powered translation, multilingual TTS tools can help non-native speakers succeed in school. They do this by providing endless reference points for accurate pronunciation, vocabulary acquisition, and overall reading comprehension.

That’s especially true for ReadSpeaker’s LMS tools, which can highlight each word the TTS speaks.

“If you’re a language learner, having the ability to see the words and hear how they’re pronounced is really part of that learning process,” Marks said.

Of course, AI voices are most effective at supporting language acquisition when they pronounce everything perfectly. ReadSpeaker offers ongoing pronunciation support, plus a custom pronunciation dictionary, to ensure that technical terms and proper nouns always sound like they should.

3. Provide smoother delivery of bilingual learning content.

Springfield Technical Community College offers several bilingual courses, which are taught in a combination of English and Spanish. Instructors have found AI translation tools and TTS to be helpful in the delivery of these multilingual course materials.

“Instructors may be completely fluent in Spanish, but if English is their working language, some Spanish terminology might be weaker,” Marks said. “I remember our instructors using AI tools to translate Powerpoint presentations, then cleaning them up with their own knowledge of the language.”

This use case illustrates an important point about multilingual AI voice tools, including auto-translation: They can help teachers as well as students. Either way, they contribute to the ultimate goal of stronger learning outcomes for every course.

4. Create greater representation for marginalized identities.

Consideration 1.3 of the UDL Guidelines asks instructors to “represent a diversity of perspectives and identities in authentic ways.”

“It is important for learners to perceive themselves and the perspectives of others in the curriculum, instructional materials, and media used in the learning environment.”

—UDL Guidelines 3.0

Representation is essential for inclusion. It also supports engagement for students who might not otherwise see themselves in the lesson. That could include a range of identities, from gender to race to ability to nationality and beyond.

Of course, it also includes non-native English speakers. Multilingual TTS and translation tools help instructors present information in every student’s native language, for greater inclusion and representation across identities.

5. Enable strong communication between administrators and parents—as well as parents and students.

Teachers and administrators don’t just communicate with students. They often have important conversations with students’ families, as well.

In many immigrant families, meanwhile, parents would like to help their children with homework, but lack the language skills to do so effectively.

Translation software and multilingual AI voice tools facilitate both types of communication. When they’re available natively in your LMS, parents can easily understand homework assignments that also reside in the learning platform. They can also help ensure understanding when you reach out to a student’s family.

How to Deliver Multilingual AI Voices in Education

As you can see, multilingual AI voice tools provide a solution for language challenges at every level of education. But what’s the best way to implement these tools?

At Springfield Technical Community College, the answer was simple: Build them into your LMS.

“Our online offerings have dramatically increased since pre-COVID, and our students love it,” Marks said. “Those courses take place largely through Blackboard [LMS]. We also require all our courses to have a Blackboard shell, and faculty are welcomed and encouraged to provide all their materials there.”

If your institution uses an LMS similarly, integrating TTS and translation software is your best bet. This approach makes language tools available where students learn, without extra barriers like opening new apps or tabs.

As we’ve mentioned, ReadSpeaker’s multilingual AI voice tools function everywhere in the LMS, not just for PDFs or specially digitized textbooks. That sets ReadSpeaker LMS integrations apart from many TTS tools; others might not work with student chat forums or assessment platforms, for example.

In short, the best way to bring the benefits of multilingual AI voice tools to your students is to contact ReadSpeaker.

“People are amazed at what it’s able to do, like taking a paragraph of text, reading it out to me, and highlighting where I am in the paragraph so I can eye-track and follow the reading,” Marks said.

You can do the same for your students.