This is the amazing Microsoft app that improves your English pronunciation using artificial intelligence.
Microsoft offers new alternatives with paid subscriptions, such as Copilot Pro and AI functions to greatly improve the experience in Windows, but it also stands out by offering some free subscriptions such as Reading Coach. This application, in its web version or as a Windows application, is dedicated to improving English pronunciation, so it is very useful for learning this language.
Especially since in order to learn to improve English pronunciation, you usually need a native English speaking teacher who focuses on how to pronounce each word correctly. Having access to a native teacher is not easy, so this tool from Microsoft is even more valuable due to its great ability at all levels.
Best of all: It's free with a Microsoft account to use on any computer. Reading Couch is available as a feature in Microsoft Teams to provide learning tips and instant feedback to improve pronunciation and speaking fluency, while giving teachers insight into their progress.
In its web version or as an app, Reading Coach also offers new experiences by allowing users to create their own stories generated by generative AI. It does this in a very visual way, with characters and story chosen in an animated style to create the text to be read aloud in English.
Here comes one of its best and most valuable experiments: AI-powered speech-to-text analysis that analyzes reading fluency, identifies the worst-pronounced words, and records accuracy, speed, and time spent.
From the first screen, Reading Coach allows you to choose between these options:
- Create a story using AI to read it aloud.
- Read some example passages from the Reading Coach library.
- Add your own clip.
- Achievements.
- The record.
When creating a story, you will be taken to a screen to choose a character, then a backstory and finally a reading level from 1 to 8 depending on the length and complexity of the texts. The AI will generate the text by choosing the reading level out loud. Of course, you need to give it permission to use the microphone in its web version.
After you finish reading the text aloud, Reader Coach will display the evaluation results with a percentage that measures the accuracy of the pronunciation, the time it took to read it, and on another card the words that the user should practice. This last option is one of the most interesting, as this Microsoft tool not only evaluates the pronunciation, but also helps to improve those words that would otherwise cost the user more.
By clicking on the “Practice words” button, you will be taken to a new screen with the words to improve. Click on one to play it with the Reader Coach audio tool, then the user clicks on the microphone to repeat it in their voice. Reader Coach will re-evaluate whether it is pronounced correctly or not and will highlight it in orange or red to recommend that the user play it again so that they can pronounce it correctly.
In the tests I have done, the truth is that it is a great tool as an external resource for improving pronunciation. Really, its value is invaluable, as it provides anyone with the possibility to improve their spoken English from a basic level to a more advanced level.