Our users spoke, and we listened: we are thrilled to unveil our new Namecoach AI for Canvas, powered by our award-winning AI-based tech! This advancement represents the culmination of years of learnings about what our users truly need to even more effectively address the name pronunciation challenge for every single student, faculty, and staff across a campus.
| Namecoach AI for Canvas key features in brief: |
|---|
|
These new features take us way beyond what we’ve been able to do with student-recorded names alone to solve the name pronunciation challenge. This both creates a more inclusive and responsive experience for students, and more effectively enables faculty and staff to get every name right.
The Core Challenge: Easy and Accurate Name Pronunciation for All
Over the last ten years, we have focused on solving a single but pervasive challenge in creating inclusive campuses and classrooms: how can we help people pronounce names correctly? After hearing my sister’s name mangled at her college graduation, the Namecoach journey started with enabling students to record and share their audio name pronunciations so that others could listen and more easily learn to say them. A simple yet important first step in addressing the challenge.
But we learned that this was only the first step of many.
The Substantial Limitations of Recorded Names
We learned that there are many users who certainly don’t want to keep hearing their names mispronounced, but also don’t end up recording their pronunciation for all sorts of reasons.
| Students’ concerns about recorded names: |
|---|
|
But for every user who doesn’t record their name, there are dozens of others who wish that they had, and need some level of pronunciation guidance – so that they can say that name with confidence, or call on that student without the hesitation and embarrassment of awkwardly guessing.
The key learning was that truly solving the name pronunciation challenge can’t depend only on users recording their own names, since that turns out to be just a small (but important!) piece of the puzzle.
The Next Level, Part 1: User-Friendly Verification and Correction with Voice Transformation
By providing students with the best possible experience from their very first interaction with our name pronunciation tools, we can now directly address the various concerns they have voiced over the years, ensuring the highest levels of adoption right off the bat.
When students first encounter Namecoach, they are now presented with a Namecoach-recommended speech-synthesized audio pronunciation of their name. Students can simply verify that it’s correct, which then shows up as a verified pronunciation for other users. Or they can correct our system just by speaking into it. And while they can still choose to publish their own voice recording, they now have the much-needed option to automagically have their voice transformed into an AI-generated Namecoach voice. This instantly eliminates the common worries related to using their own voice recording, around being self-conscious, discrimination, privacy, and safety/security.
In addition, for many names, students will be able to verify from among multiple pronunciation options presented, beyond the top recommended one. In a world with over 30 million unique names, an astounding 80% of them have multiple pronunciations. As our system continuously improves, the ongoing addition of verified pronunciation options will increasingly reflect the true diversity of names back to the user, making their unique name verification even easier.
With Namecoach AI for Canvas, students no longer need to choose between their concerns around using their own voice and not hearing others say their names correctly; and by eliminating the need for them to choose, faculty and staff at partner institutions will now enjoy even more verified pronunciations than ever.
The Next Level, Part 2: Namecoach Recommended Pronunciations
While it would be great if everyone would verify or provide their pronunciation, helping users feel confident in their interactions and helping them make others feel included shouldn’t depend on that. When a student hasn’t yet verified or provided their name, Namecoach AI for Canvas now recommends a speech-synthesized audio pronunciation, so that every user can more confidently pronounce any name they are unsure of.
We have leveraged the world’s largest database of accurate name pronunciations to build the most accurate recommendation system, and as more users interact with the system, it continuously improves over time, so that the pronunciations are ever more accurate and personalized to every individual. This empowers faculty and staff to contribute to creating inclusive environments far more often than before, even when a student hasn’t recorded their own name.
This also reduces the burden on faculty and administrators concerned about adoption to try to get every student to record their name; they can immediately enjoy the benefits of having a level of pronunciation guidance for 100% of the names they’re unsure how to say.
Most importantly, this further reduces the burden on already marginalized students – many of whom have had to either constantly correct others or suffer subtle indignities in silence throughout their lives – to have to take steps to ensure their names are pronounced correctly. Namecoach AI for Canvas makes it much more likely that every student can enjoy hearing their name said correctly, and feel a greater sense of belonging, whether or not they record their name.
Cross-Platform Connectivity and Ease of Use
With all these new features, it remains true that when students record, verify, or correct their names, they want to do that just once — and that our partner institutions want to make that pronunciation accessible across many use cases and systems.
We will continue to make this easy. Namecoach AI for Canvas seamlessly connects with all other Namecoach integrations – from Salesforce and Outlook to top SIS systems to our Commencement offerings, to all our other integrations and custom apps using our API – so that we continue to put the student’s user experience first. This is true both for the millions of recordings and profiles students have already made across our partner institutions to date, and for the new profiles being configured using our new features in Canvas.
And of course, our current users will have the opportunity to easily choose a voice-transformed and anonymized version of their existing recording if they wish, without having to record their name again. In addition, users will continue to have an opportunity to easily port their name pronunciation into a Namebadge that they can use in their email signatures or anywhere else they choose, to help others say their names both as students and after they graduate.
More Magic to Come
The new Namecoach-recommended pronunciation, verification, correction, and voice transformation features in Namecoach AI for Canvas are the next giant leap in the evolution of name pronunciation technology. But making it easier and easier to get names right doesn’t stop there, and here’s a preview of things to come:
Best-in-class automated phonetic spellings of names
While our field for user-generated phonetics is a great start, such phonetics are inconsistent and often difficult for others to understand. Namecoach will automagically provide accurate and easy-to-understand phonetic spellings for every name, along with an in-line visual pronunciation guide, both improving accessibility and providing an important complement to audio pronunciations that makes it even easier for users to learn names.
Next-gen Scan & Play technology for flawless commencements
Pronunciations that students have already verified or corrected in our Canvas integration or other tools will now seamlessly flow into our next-gen Scan & Play technology, which will soon be the new standard for flawless commencements everywhere.
Students – and their institutions – increasingly want to make sure there is no opportunity to mangle names at graduation. Rather than rely on live graduation readers who can always make mistakes, schools can simply scan a card as a student crosses the stage to play our Namecoach AI-synthesized audio of their name – which has been verified or corrected as needed ahead of time – to ensure that every single name is announced perfectly!
Pronunciation guidance tailored to the speaker’s language
Namecoach’s unique Phoneme Conversion project maps out the best way for English-speaking Americans to say names containing non-English sounds that are difficult for them to pronounce. We will do this for every major language, so that pronunciation guidance is always tailored to be even easier for the speaker of a name.
Visual pronunciation guidance (aka ‘Pronunciation Karaoke’)
What if knowing how to say a name was even simpler than following lyrics on a Karaoke screen? By highlighting syllables in our automated phonetic spellings as a student’s verified audio pronunciation is played, users can more easily learn even the names that are most complicated and unfamiliar to them.
Real-time pronunciation coaching
For users who want an extra level of active help, enabling real-time pronunciation coaching will allow Namecoach to listen to the speaker’s pronunciation, compare it against the correct pronunciation, and provide immediate feedback to help them understand which syllables to change and how. No matter the name, and no matter the speaker, our mission is to make it as easy as possible for every user to say every name correctly and with confidence.
And these are just the features that are designed to help with name pronunciation. We will eventually provide features that more generally help faculty and students – and really any user – better connect with each other personally and culturally, and enable them to promote inclusion and belonging in every interaction!
AI for Good
Namecoach AI for Canvas is a major leap forward in ensuring the students, faculty, and staff have the best possible experience with name pronunciation. And in an age when AI can be increasingly used in ways that exacerbate differences and inequities, we are especially proud that our tools will play a part in advancing Instructure’s mission and our partner institutions’ mission to ensure that AI in our learning technology truly complements learning in intentional, safe, and equitable ways.
– Praveen Shanbhag, Founder & CEO
