>> In this episode of the AI Show,
Join us to hear from Mike Tholfsen,
Microsoft Education Program Manager.
Mike will talk us through how we can use Immersive Reader to embed
text reading and comprehension capabilities
into our applications. You're not going to want to miss it.
[MUSIC]
>> Hi. My name is Mike Tholfsen and I
work on the Microsoft Education Team.
I am going to be talking about the Immersive Reader.
This is a new cognitive service
that's currently in public preview.
So here's the agenda we're going to be walking through.
This is going to be a short session,
so we'll be moving quickly.
As a background, the Immersive Reader
is something that we initially
designed inclusively to really help people with dyslexia.
This was a few years ago during a hackathon.
We took the latest science and research around reading,
and we focused exclusively on dyslexia with
the hypothesis that these techniques
would help all people with reading.
We've taken that across the board and we're seeing help with
students with ADHD, emerging leaders,
non-native speakers, the parents of non-native speakers,
college students, information workers,
visual impairments across the board.
This is a very inclusive and accessible tool.
It's already built in to Word,
OneNote, Teams, Outlook, Forms, Flipgrid,
Office Lens, and we're already seeing
publicly announced 23 million monthly active users
using these Immersive Reader technologies.
We know that there's a giant assistive technology market
just in the United States,
even broader outside that reaches very far.
Now, why would a partner benefit
from integrating the Immersive Reader?
Well, first off, equity and
inclusion is a top concern for schools,
but also for corporations and companies and public sector.
So it's not just schools,
it's many places where inclusion equity is critical.
Also, there's a large population of non-native speakers,
or English language learners as we call them in the US.
It's estimated that up to 18 percent of people at
home or parents don't speak
the native language in the US of English.
You can have access to some of the world's top assisted and
accessible technology without making
really any engineering investments
other than the original integration,
compliance for accessibility laws,
which are different around the world,
but there's many requirements for accessibility.
Also the partner integration time,
so on your backlog and engineering work is very small.
We've had many partners do this integration in less than one day.
All you really need is an Azure subscription ID
and a chunk of text and a little bit of engineering time.
Then any new updates that we make,
new languages that you'll see,
or new features or
new images in our capabilities for picture dictionary,
automatically flow to the partners,
there's no work involved.
So what is the Immersive Reader?
I'll be doing a demo.
But there's a set of capabilities here that I'm going to
show that are all can be used at the same time,
or one at a time, or a mix-and-match.
So let's switch to the demo.
So here I am. I'm in
the world's most popular learning management system called Canvas.
Many universities and schools use Canvas, some corporations too.
So I'm in Canvas and I've a page of text.
They've integrated this Immersive Reader,
and there's a button here called Immersive Reader.
You can integrate this any way you want.
With tech thing Immersive Reader,
use the icon on hover, there's lots of ways.
I'll click "Immersive Reader".
Now what you're seeing here is we abstract the user interface.
We get all that text and we make it simplified.
We call this focus mode.
At the bottom, there's a Play button and I'll click that.
>> Geography. The study of
Earth's land forms is called physical geography.
>> So you can hear a high-grade
neural text-to-speech voice that's built-in.
I can choose the voice speed,
make it faster or slower,
or male or female voices.
If I click on the "AA" in the upper right,
I'll show text preferences.
So we know from research that if you
increase the spacing between letters,
words, and the sentence lines,
that can reduce visual crowding.
So I have reduced visual crowding for
some people that can help improve reading speeds.
I can choose the background color very easily.
Many people prefer to read with
a different background color overlay,
they don't like the white or black.
These are tuned for accessibility,
and you can see many of these choices are built right in.
I can also increase the text size,
so I can make it much bigger.
So think about people with vision impairments,
think about early readers,
think about people with dyslexia.
All of the above can be helping with these large fonts.
But now we're going to get to the interesting stuff.
So I'm going to go here to
this middle one that's called Grammar Options.
So breaking words in a syllables.
Think about early students reading,
students put dyslexia, and we can think about non-native speakers.
I clicked on "Syllables",
and using the Azure Cloud services,
we break the words in a syllables with a single click.
I can highlight the nouns, the verbs,
the adjectives, these different parts of speech,
and I can even show labels.
So for a vision impairments and I can't detect any colors,
I can have the label showing,
and I can also change colors.
So maybe for nouns I want to have blue,
and maybe for other ones I want to turn those off.
So it's very easy to customize
the different colors and shades and what's on and what's off.
So I'll turn these back off.
Next up, I'm going to show reading preferences,
and I'm going to make the background
blue and thinking about focusing on different lines.
So people with cerebral palsy,
for example, might want to focus the eyes.
People with ADHD or dyslexia often like
to have these reading rulers that you put over the screen.
That's what they call these things.
You can see I can scroll,
I can still read out loud.
>> Mountains and valleys.
They can also be glaciers or river.
>> I can choose three lines or five lines.
It's very easy for me to customize that line focus.
Now I can also click on a word and see a picture.
So I click here and see Earth.
>> Earth's.
>> Mountains.
>> Or valleys.
>> Valleys.
>> Now I can also go to reading preferences and translate.
We have over 67 languages to translate.
So think about someone who's trying to read a piece of
content and be able to translate,
I'll turn on by word.
Let's go back on Spanish and say, Earth's
>> Earth's.
[FOREIGN]
>> Notice how it changed
that read aloud voice as well into the new language.
>> Mountains.
[FOREIGN]
>> If I want to translate the entire document,
I go back in a reading preferences and choose Document,
and now watch what happens.
[FOREIGN]
>> So we need to follow, I'm going to slow that down,
I can make it slower.
[FOREIGN]
>> I can go back to the original by clicking
on the top here or back to Spanish.
This works in many languages.
So everything right there is all in the Immersive Reader.
I'll talk through some of the feedback,
and then how easy it is to hook this up yourself.
So just a great quote from an educator
on the impact of the Immersive Reader.
Again, many people don't just grow out of dyslexia.
Many people don't grow out of vision impairments,
they will use this their entire lives.
So this applies to.
enterprise workers, small businesses, public sector, college,
all in-between, just as background,
not going into detail,
but we've won many awards.
So this is based on research,
and the Immersive Reader has
one leading worldwide disability awards
as well as digital promise for research-based design.
So this is all based in science and research.
I'm not going to go into the details,
but we have more available in this deck.
We've had many partners who've
already integrated the Immersive Reader.
So we're at over 80 partners now.
I've just got a few of the top ones right here on this slide.
We also have really powerful feedback from our customers that have
experienced the Immersive Reader integrated in their solution,
so it can make you look really good as a partner.
Timeline and pricing. We expect GA,
general availability in the summer,
and you can integrate across any of these apps.
It can be Web, iPad,
iPhone, Android, a Windows 10 app.
All this information is available on
our public website and everything is free
right now until we go to general availability.
So you can try it out,
put it in test environments,
get early access to customers.
It's completely free.
But this will be part of the Cognitive Services,
and will have a similar pricing model,
which will be likely based on usage.
In terms of developer information, a great quote,
"It's the easiest integration I've done in 27 years."
The SDK can work on
all these different platforms like I mentioned.
We have a full getting-started site,
and we also have this Azure subscription ID
you can get with no cost.
All you really need to do is have
your Azure subscription ID and send the chunk of
text and pass that up to the service
and we return you that
the Immersive Reader window, much like an iframe.
We've even created some short engineering videos you can
watch that walks you exactly through how to set this up.
I'm going to show one briefly right now.
But each of them has 10 minutes.
Again, this can be done in just a couple of hours.
So I'll switch over to that now.
Here's our public blog that has all the information,
documentation, SDK, and the short little videos.
So as an example, I'm going to open up this
Part 3 quick start sample code walkthrough.
>> Hi. My name is Tessa [inaudible].
I'm a developer on the Immersive Reader Team.
Today I'll be taking you through
the C-Sharp Quickstart to
create a web app that launches the Immersive Reader.
>> So this is just a seven-minute video.
I'll skip ahead and show a couple of different parts.
This talks about where you get your Azure AD authentication token.
>> The prerequisite steps. So I already have them right here.
I'm going to go back into Visual Studio.
I'm going to right-click on my project in the solution explorer.
If you don't see the solution explorer,
you might need to go into window and make sure that it's selected.
>> So this video goes step-by-step
on how to get your sample app up and running.
By the end of it, I'm just going to show what you have is
a little web app that just has a chunk of
text and sends it to the subscription ID.
So here we are at the end, here's the sample app,
and then there's the Immersive Reader button that they wired up.
>> See up here in the top-right,
we have our Immersive Reader button.
So if you click on this,
it's going to launch
the Immersive Reader with the text that was on that page.
It I'll show you the first run experience and
everything, all set up for you.
>> So these short little videos walk you through like,
how to get authentication setup,
how to do your Quickstart app.
Then if you wanted to do a advanced examples, you can do that too.
So I'll switch back to finalize this session.
Some common questions.
Do we support math?
Yes, we support math equations and MathML.
We support HTML, other than images and tables.
We're hoping to bring images and tables
support to the Immersive Reader by late summer,
and hopefully PDF by the end of the year.
Also we support ePUBS,
but you need to extract the HTML and text yourself.
That's it for my session.
Please send me any questions on Twitter,
send me an e-mail, and I'm happy to answer them. Thanks a lot.
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