Why is using Text To Speech for eLearning beneficial for students?
I recently came across an article titled Don't use text-to-speech software for eLearning. In it, the author argues that using Text To Speech for eLearning can present information, but does not actually help students learn. He claims that only a good teacher or a trained voice talent can teach successfully.
Working in the Text To Speech industry, I have spent a lot of time researching why Text To Speech is used for eLearning purposes, and how affects a student's learning experience.
First of all, why can you answer with a word, accessibility. Just as eLearning makes education more accessible to students outside the classroom, Text To Speech makes content within an eLearning course more accessible to students by reading it aloud. This is especially beneficial for students with visual or learning disabilities.
Text To Speech is also a time-saving and inexpensive solution compared to hiring a voice talent. It is cheap and very easy to implement. Due to these reasons, we have seen many eLearning providers turn to Text To Speech to list their courses.
The original article touches all these points and does not dispute them. However, the author goes on to say that learning is not easily accomplished with Text To Speech and compares it to a dry, single-pitch teacher who cannot interact with the listener. In summary, he claims that Text To Speech does not positively benefit a student's learning experience.
First, as I mentioned earlier, I've examined a lot how Text To Speech affects students' learning experience. Much research has been done on this topic over the past decade. Overwhelmingly, the results show that Text To Speech is truly beneficial to students and helps them learn. I will highlight some of these studies below.
Secondly, I do not agree that Text To Speech is dry and cannot interact with the listener. The technology has come a long way in recent years and it sounds incredibly realistic (if you choose a high-quality text-to-speech provider). A natural sounding text-to-speech voice can easily bring any text to life.
I'll touch on this later as well, but first, let's get to the investigation.
What research says about the effectiveness of text-to-speech
To start, a study published in the Journal of Special Education Technology wanted to see if Text To Speech improved literacy skills. Students with literacy difficulties were divided into groups with one of the groups receiving assistive software (Text To Speech) to help them read. Students in the assistive software group saw improvement in reading comprehension, detection of misspellings, and understanding of word meaning. The rest of the students in the control groups saw no significant improvement in any of these areas.
Another study, which you can read in its entirety here, also tested the effects of Text To Speech on struggling readers in high school. The results found that participants who used Text To Speech software with their reading materials had significantly improved their reading skills.
In these cases, being able to listen to the text, rather than just reading it, significantly helped students improve their reading comprehension. Although it was not a real human to read the text to them, they could still learn better thanks to the Text To Speech software.
Two more studies published in the Journal of Special Education Technology tested the effectiveness of Text To Speech for students with special needs.
The first examined the effects of a Text To Speech screen reader on students with learning disabilities ranging from traumatic brain injury, autism, cognitive disabilities, and emotional disabilities. The results showed that students using the Text To Speech reader had improved their performance in school. The researchers concluded that Text To Speech positively affected the students' learning experience by helping them better understand the concepts and keep them motivated.
The other study consisted of giving students with moderate learning disabilities a reading in Microsoft Reader for them to review while they are at home. Students who received Text-to-Speech tools were able to better understand the information independently. This study demonstrated that Text To Speech can help students with learning disabilities learn and study on their own.
Now, I am not saying that the same results would not have been achieved in each of these cases if a prerecorded voice talent had read the text aloud. However, these studies demonstrated that Text To Speech technology alone successfully helped students learn. In each of these studies, as well as several others that I have read, Text To Speech improved student learning experiences.
I have no hesitation in saying that using Text To Speech for eLearning is beneficial for students. The claim that Text To Speech only presents information without teaching is not really supported by the investigation.
Text-to-speech voices can be engaging
The other point I wanted to highlight was that Text To Speech technology has advanced enough to be very attractive, rather than boring and dry. Text To Speech might be known for the robotic sounding vocals of the '90s, but times have certainly changed. High-quality voices can sound surprisingly human. Here is a brief exercise from a lesson on Benjamin Franklin. You can hear it read aloud by Julie's voice from NeoSpeech here.
Ben Franklin, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was also a scientist, philanthropist, statesman, civic leader, and diplomat. He is considered one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. "
As you can hear for yourself, a modern, high-quality text-to-speech voice can sound very realistic, and a big part of that is because Julie's text-to-speech engine parses every piece of text she receives to understand the meaning and context of the text. Once the engine has applied the meaning to each word and sentence, it inserts the appropriate inflection, pitch, and timing throughout the speech.
A side note on that point, notice I said a high quality Text-to-speech can do those things. If you want your eLearning Text To Speech voice to be as engaging as possible, make sure you don't skimp on quality.
Research shows that Text To Speech technology in eLearning is beneficial to students. Voices can be engaging, which helps students learn. Additionally, a Text-to-Speech engine can instantly convert any length of text to speech, as opposed to a voice talent that must be programmed to make a recording, and is often much more expensive than a Text-to-Speech solution.