EnglishCentral Launches New Pronunciation Center

New Machine Learning Techniques Double Precision for Learners

September 9, 2021. Boston, MA. EnglishCentral today released its new Pronunciation Center, the industry’s first online English pronunciation tool trained on over 1 billion learner events.

For the last 10 years, our learners have provided us over 1 billion learning events on how they learn English, said Alan Schwartz, Founder & CEO of EnglishCentral. We have used this data to create what we call a “Teacher-Machine Learning Loop” that leverages our team of over 600 trained professional English teachers to train and improve our IntelliSpeechSM machine learning platform.

The new Pron Center, powered by IntelliSpeechSM, more than doubles the accuracy in detecting errors in learners’ pronunciation and fluency compared to previous versions. The goal with AI-feedback on EnglishCentral is to emulate what great teachers do. For example, instead of pointing out each and every pronunciation mistake a student makes, a great teacher focuses on just those egregious mistakes that make the students speech unintelligible. This is key to maintain students’ motivation to keep practicing. The 2x increase in accuracy in our latest version is specifically related to reducing “false alerts”, i.e., penalizing learners for mistakes that are in fact not mistakes that matter for intelligibility.

“EnglishCentral has led the market here for English pronunciation training for almost a decade now,” said Dr. Charles Browne, PhD at Meiji Gakuin University, and developer of the New General Service List (NGSL), a popular high-frequency vocabulary list used worldwide. “In addition to the accuracy improvements with this latest Pron Center, the tight integration with high-frequency vocabulary lists means learners can focus their speaking practice on just those words that matter the most. EnglishCentral is the only vocab tool on the market I am aware of that allows students to systematically practice speaking high frequency words in context,” added Dr. Browne.

The Pronunciation Center is currently available on the desktop and mobile version of the EnglishCentral website. It will be available on Android and iOS apps later this year.

Press Contact:
Shun Furuyama, Marketing Director, press@englishcentral.com, Phone: +815038023236