In the LetsRead project, IT and Microsoft Portugal have been working in developing a technological module able to evaluate on-the-fly how well a child performs on reading tasks. A prototype application is being developed to detect mispronunciations, hesitations and other disfluency indicators, in order to compute an overall reading ability index. This system that, according to Fernando Perdigão from IT, will be ready during the next months could be used in schools to aid teachers in student assessments and also as a speech therapy tool.

Due to this collaboration between IT and Microsoft Portugal, Jorge Proença, a PhD student from the Multimedia Signal Processing group in IT Coimbra, has completed an internship at Microsoft Portugal, in Lisbon, supervised by Fernando Perdigão (IT) and Sara Candeias (Microsoft Portugal), where he collaborated closely with the Microsoft Language Development Center team for the LetsRead project.