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Carnegie Speech

To be understood and to understand - because mission-critical communications matter

SpeakIraqi™

Overview

At Carnegie Speech, we believe that communicating in an accurate, understandable and timely manner is critical to build trust, maintain safety and build relationships. Based on these core beliefs, Carnegie Speech developed SpeakIraqi.

SpeakIraqi features a phrasal spoken-Iraqi training program that enables novice speakers to receive rapid and focused spoken Iraqi training for mission-specific assignments. In addition, we developed an advanced spoken Iraqi language training system for Modern Standard Arabic speakers that enables rapid skill transfer and provides auxiliary training to quickly achieve spoken Iraqi fluency.

SpeakIraqi is built on the same technology-base that enables NativeAccent® to improve spoken language scores by 50% to 100% with as little as 20 hours training while decreasing language training time and costs by up to 50%.

Phrasal Features

SpeakIraqi Phrasal teaches Iraqi language novices words and phrases identified as mission-critical by the United States Defense Language Institute. The product uses proven cognitive science techniques to increase the permanence of learning and the fluency of language retrieval in real-world situations. In addition, the pronunciation component of the software ensures that the student will be understood by native Iraqi's. Specific features include:

  • Intelligent tutor creates a personalized vocabulary and pronunciation curriculum for each student.
  • Flashcard system gradually builds skills in recognition, pronunciation and generation.
  • Dialogues include phrases in real-world conversations and give instructions on correct cultural context.
  • Immediate, patented pinpointing feedback and targeted remediation tells students exactly what was wrong with their pronunciation and exactly how to fix it.
  • Exercises train bi-directionally between Iraqi and English and create multiple memory indices to improve learning effectiveness and efficiencies.
  • Timed-practice exercises improve fluency.
  • Transliteration system does not require students to be able to read the Iraqi script.
  • Extensive reporting tracks progress for students and instructors.

Advanced Features

SpeakIraqi Advanced teaches those conversant in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) to speak Iraqi in an intelligible and fluent manner. This training focuses on the differences between Iraqi and MSA in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and cultural usage. The curriculum consists of high-use, Iraqi-differentiated and mission-specific content. In addition to the features found in SpeakIraqi Phrasal, SpeakIraqi Advanced also contains the following features:

  • Pre-training assessment determines the student's initial MSA proficiency.
  • Training occurs using the Iraqi alphabet with optional transliteration capabilities for students who require additional support.
  • Extended curriculum in Iraqi pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.
  • Post-training assessment determines the student's Iraqi proficiency.

How It Works

SpeakIraqi is built on an extensible software platform featuring Speech Recognition and Artificial Intelligence technologies under exclusive license from Carnegie Mellon University to enable interactive, personalized spoken Iraqi instruction.

By modeling each user's speaking characteristics and analyzing their speech proficiency against a statistical model of native Iraqi speakers, SpeakIraqi pinpoints speech errors and provides immediate, actionable and user-specific feedback. Instruction and correction is presented in text, audio and graphics to be intuitive and relevant to the learner. Like all Carnegie Speech products, SpeakIraqi runs on the desktop or the Internet, which makes spoken Iraqi language instruction available anytime – anywhere.