English training for techies is in the cloud

IT Decisions has commented in the past on the difficulties faced by IT professionals in Brazil who want to learn, or improve, their English language skills – though given the growth of the IT industry in Brazil some might argue that the rest of the world needs to learn Portuguese.

There has also been a series of disappointments, such as Brasscom quietly dropping their pledge to implement an industry-wide program of English language training for IT professionals.

So it’s interesting when something comes along that looks a little bit different from the usual ‘this-is-a-pen’ books, CDs, and tired training courses.

EyeSpeak Brasil is not a large outfit – as far as I can see there has been no other media comment on their system yet. Their technology originates from New Zealand and they only have a single representative in Brazil, but in many ways that reflects the nature of their service. It’s direct, to the point, and uses voice-recognition technology in the cloud to deliver quite an interesting and different language learning experience.

Eyespeak Brasil is led by Robert McCall, who is based in Rio de Janeiro. McCall believes that the language training his company is offering is very different to that offered by most – especially the English schools to be found in most Brazilian city centres.

“Voice activated learning allows students to learn to speak with the correct pronunciation, stress, timing and fluency. The content can be customized for any language, subject, business, university, school, or purpose,” he said.

McCall added: “Our software has been developed using sound pedagogical principals by linguists so it stands up to academic criticism and the platform and technology is stable in any browser so it has a wide reach.”

McCall gave IT Decisions a demo of his system and it was even sensitive enough to attempt to correct his New Zealand accent – being calibrated to expect American English, though he pointed out that it could be configured to expect any type of accent.

Voice recognition systems have been in place for many years now and have improved dramatically in the past couple of years. McCall makes a point of rarely typing at all – he uses the voice recognition tools built into his language learning system to also produce emails and other general office activities.

IT Decisions is not in the business of endorsing specific software platforms, but there are a number of reasons why this tool stands out from the crowd of companies trying to sell English training in Brazil:

• No software installation is required – it all runs in the cloud on any browser
• The language recognition aspect adds an important dimension beyond just learning vocabulary alone… if only some Brazilian parents had checked with this tool before naming their new-born ‘Maicon’
• Being a cloud-based tool, the charges are per month per user… simple, and based on what McCall explained to IT Decisions the prices seem very reasonable indeed, much lower than registering at a ‘bricks and mortar’ training school
• It is entirely configurable for any language or industry – perhaps if readers of this article are interested, IT Decisions could work with Eyespeak Brasil to try designing a course focused specifically on the IT industry in Brazil?

EyeSpeak in action – comparing a sentence read by the computer to the same sentence read by the learner

Photo by Wayan Vota licensed under Creative Commons