More information on Using of AI for Speech Therapy & Teaching

Storybooks have always been a go-to tool for speech therapists and teachers. The visual plus the auditory (being read to), depending on how it is presented, captivates young minds and fosters a love for reading and language. Using artificial intelligence (AI) for storybooks is not taking away from effective storybook learning. On the contrary, it enhances it. In today’s tech-savvy world, traditional storybooks can enhance the power of AI to create an even more engaging and educational experience for elementary students. Speech therapists and teachers can harness AI technology to craft interactive storybooks that cater to individual learning needs and promote speech and language development.

Here are a few thoughts to start you on your journey of crafting interactive storybooks using AI:

Select the right AI tools: Begin by choosing AI tools and platforms that align with your objectives. Unfortunately, as many of the AI tools are coming on the market, it is difficult to know which one. Experience and learning from others come into play to help you find a tool that gives speech and natural language processing capabilities to make the story interactive and responsive. Check out some AI software names and comments below.
Identify learning goals: Determine the speech and language and pre-reading goals you want to address through the story. Are you targeting vocabulary development, articulation, comprehension, or fluency? Knowing your objectives is important. An example of why this is important can be seen in a story I developed (see Storywizard.ai below). I told the system I wanted a story about dragons, flies, dragonflies, butter, butterflies, etc. with the end goal of phonological awareness at the syllable level. The system gave me an excellent story and illustrations and even comprehension questions (with me later creating the PA exercises like “I say dragonflies and then tell the student to say the same without dragon – ‘flies’.” Storywizard.ai allows for audio reading of the story and in multiple languages. Therefore, my phonological awareness goal in English will not work if the phonological awareness is being addressed in Spanish. That is why looking at the goal is important when having AI create your lessons.
Accessibility features: Consider students with special needs by including accessibility features, such as text-to-speech for non-verbal students or dyslexia-friendly fonts (text fonts can often be changed either through the AI system or you can re-type) or audio for those with vision or bi-lingual for non-English speakers.
Engage with multimodal elements: Combine text with audio, images, and animations to cater to different learning styles and enhance comprehension.
Continual improvement: AI allows for ongoing updates and improvements. Keep refining your interactive storybooks based on feedback and evolving educational needs as well as changes and improvements in AI.

Incorporating AI into interactive storybooks can revolutionize the way young students learn and practice speech, language, pre-reading, and early reading skills. These innovative tools not only make learning more engaging but also provide insights into each student’s progress. By combining technology with creativity, speech therapists and teachers can help our students thrive even more in their education.

At this time, AI is still ongoing development. However, some of the software has reached the point that many speech therapists and teachers can benefit in efficiency as well as perhaps creating for-sale materials as well.

Here are several this author has used (I do not receive affiliate compensation):

Chat.openai.com – excellent for illustrations and somewhat for stories. I also like it for creating images for activities. I can simply command it to give me a list of 10 one-syllable words that begin with a specific phoneme. Then, I come back and prompt it to create an image for each of those words. I can have the system do it in color, with or without background, or I can even have it do blacklines for coloring pages.
Storywizard.ai – excellent for short books that you can add questions, audio, AND different languages. You have the capability to change the writing and illustrations. You may not have as much leeway sharing and/or selling this so check the T&C carefully. I suggest trying the family pack of 3 stories for $10 (as of this writing). There are also teacher packs. I am including a few images from the story I had them write and illustrate. I gave them the idea for the story and have not done any edits as they allow.