Equity Right From The Start
September 27, 2023
Today, SoapBox launched an important new resource for education companies and classrooms – a checklist for assessing equity in voice AI, and all AI tools.
This checklist aims to guide companies in asking the important questions of their voice providers before considering integrating voice AI into their literacy, language and math tools for preK-12 classrooms.
While voice-enabled learning tools for kids are growing in popularity, the AI that powers them is often not accurate or representative enough to be used in a high stakes environment like a classroom, where kids of all academic abilities, ages, and accents deserve equal and inclusive opportunities to learn and build their academic confidence.
“SoapBox believes that voice AI can help teachers to close the literacy gap in their classrooms, but only if it works equally well for all children”
Our checklist offers guidance in assessing AI in two key areas:
- Checking for Equity – the questions to ask to understand if a voice engine is capable of representing the full diversity of the populations you’re looking to serve.
- Verifying for Equity – how to assess whether a voice AI system has been tested and proven to perform accurately in real world environments like classrooms.
The SoapBox checklist is not designed to be an exhaustive list of topics or ways to assess for bias but we hope it gives you a helpful start based on our work developing voice AI for kids in grades preK-12 over the last 10 years.
We would love your feedback! Language – and AI – are constantly evolving so we plan to publish updates and iterations on this checklist over time, based on our experiences and your feedback. Email us your thoughts on Hello@SoapBoxLabs.com
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