Learn more about Bot-Reader!

Over the past year, Literacy Link South Central has been providing input on an application designed to help adult students with their literacy skills - specifically reading, pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary and word comprehension. The tool, called Bot-Reader, includes several key features of interest:

• Merge (Bot-Reader’s artificial being) supports and guides learners as they use the application. Merge listens, responds, offers challenges, and tracks the learner’s progress.
• The Bot-Library includes thousands of free books and articles, and allows both learners and practitioners to upload their own custom content.
• The dashboard allows practitioners to assign specific books or articles along with spelling, pronunciation, and comprehension tests to individual learners. Through the dashboard, they can also track learner progress and amount of time spent.

The Bot-Reader was recently piloted with a group of LBS learners and positive feedback resulted from that trial. Bot Publishing, the developer of the Bot-Reader, has used that feedback to make additional improvements to the tool, and it is almost ready to be released.

That leads us to the unique circumstances surrounding adult literacy in the age of COVID-19 and quarantines. We think that there may be an excellent opportunity for LBS programs to use the Bot-Reader to support distance learning during this time, and the developers agree. While there will be a cost associated with this tool when it is formally released to the public, they are offering it free-of-charge to LBS programs interested in using it with their learners from now through July 1, 2020. Details surrounding the cost of use in the long-term are still to be determined.

We would like to offer interested LBS program staff an opportunity to learn more about this application and hear feedback from those who used it during the pilot. To that end we have scheduled two online meetings where you can hear from the developers, watch a demo of the Bot-Reader, and ask questions. These meetings will be run on Wednesday April 22 at 3:00 pm , and Thursday April 23 at 10:00 am .

To ensure the security of these meetings, the links will not be posted publicly - if you would like to attend, please email us at literacylink@gmail.com to request the meeting link and password for either session.