Using Commercial ASR Solutions to Assess Reading Skills in Children: A Case Report

Reading is an acquired skill that is essential for integrating and participating in today's society. Yet, becoming literate can be particularly laborious for some children. Identifying reading difficulties early enough is the first, necessary step toward remediation. Here we investigate the opportunities and limitations of integrating commercial, off-the-shelf automatic speech recognition (ASR) services from IBM Watson to ease the administration and evaluation of children's reading assessment tests in French and Italian.