Safeguarding Students—Why Responsible AI in Education Is Essential

My 6-year-old daughter loves chatting with AI—asking it questions, playing games, learning jokes—but for it to work, she needs it to clearly understand what she is saying. When it doesn’t, she gets frustrated. The conversation generated by the agent sounds sophisticated, but it can sometimes misinterpret my daughter and take things in unexpected directions. Why does this happen? Mostly, it’s because the voice AI powering the chat agent has been built for adult voices, adult speech patterns, and adult interactions—not children's.  

For more than a decade, I have been building voice AI designed to understand children’s unique speech patterns and provide detailed feedback to help them grow as readers. More and more, teachers are discovering that responsible AI-powered tools like voice AI, built specifically for reading, can enhance the great literacy work they're already doing to improve student outcomes. These tools can engage students' attention and encourage them to read aloud and practice more. Responsibly built voice AI tools also return important and timely insights to teachers on the individual student level and by looking at the longitudinal progress of the whole class. 

However, not all voice AI tools are created equal. This is the lesson my daughter and I learn each time she engages with them and is misunderstood. Sure, this is a low-stakes play type of engagement, but imagine the impact this kind of misunderstanding could have on a striving reader or a student working through mathematical reasoning out loud.

AI is everywhere, and it will continue to become a deeper and more integral part of the fabric of our lives. But how can we tell if the AI we’re using is fit for purpose? How can teachers tell if it's helping or hindering student engagement and learning?

Exploring whether your AI is responsibly built is a great place to start.

Here are three things teachers should expect from these tools:

1. Protects Privacy for Teachers and Students
   Both you and your students' families rightfully want to know that their children’s personal data is secure and protected. Any AI tool you use should meet the highest standards for student data privacy compliance, be transparent about its data policies, and adhere to all child-specific privacy regulations. Responsible voice AI tools, for example, need to adhere to a privacy-by-design approach that proactively builds in protections for student voice data from the earliest design stage through to the student user experience.
   
   
2. Represents All Voices in Classrooms
   When I think of the frustration my daughter feels when AI doesn't understand her speech (not only is she young, but like every child, she has her own unique style of speaking), I consider the potential limitations of a voice AI-powered tool in a classroom full of kids. AI models learn from the data they’re trained on. If that data doesn’t fully reflect the developmental stage and unique voices of emerging readers, the AI-powered tool will not accurately assess the voices it hears and analyzes. When it is trained responsibly, like ours is, on hundreds of thousands of children’s voices from around the world, it can become a teacher’s best friend, returning immediate and accurate feedback on every young reader’s progress, regardless of their dialect or reading level. 
    
3. Co-Created with Educators
   Effective AI learning tools cannot be built in isolation. Without input from teachers and students, programs risk being overengineered and impractical for classrooms. Responsible AI tools must be able to measure and share the value they’re adding to the teaching and learning process, they must be actionable and align with curricular needs, and they must deepen engagement for students. In short, they must be built to support you in driving better student outcomes. 

Responsible AI-powered tools can: 

• Save you time, eliminating the need to manually assess each student’s literacy levels 
• Increase your time for instruction, engagement, and support of students 
• Provide granular and timely feedback on each student’s reading abilities so you can meet them where they are and when they need support
• Deepen students’ engagement in learning

Learn more about how responsible AI solutions can help improve student outcomes. 

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Other recommended resources in our literacy blog library: 
The Importance of Foundational Literacy
Anita Archer Takes the Stage: The Science of Reading in Focus
Where Do We Go from Here? Responding to the NAEP Reading Scores