Dive Brief:

• Sesame Workshop, the non-profit behind Sesame Street, has struck a deal with ToyTalk, a speech recognition company, to research the ability to teach preschool literacy with conversational technology.  
• The two-year deal reflects work the two organizations have already collaborated on this past year, with Sesame building mobile apps that utilize ToyTalk's trademark PullString technology, which uses speech recognition to decode a child's speech pattern and issue scripted, appropriate responses.  
• ToyTalk has already produced apps that allow children to speak with animated characters, such as Winston Show, but their demographic focus has always been 4-8-year-olds —​older than Sesame Workshop's preschool target. 

Dive Insight:

While Winston Show is successful with the 4-8-year-old demographic, the technology was also easier to create since those children typically already have a command of the English language. Creating a tool that can respond to and understand a younger child who pauses more frequently and pronounces words less clearly is a different ball game. Currently, the two companies are having kids in the pre-K age range use ToyTalk as they speak with characters so that they can collect speech patterns. “The more children talk to our characters, the better we get at understanding what they are saying,” ToyTalk CEO and co-founder Oren Jacob told the New York Times.

So what spurred this relationship between Sesame and Toy Talk?  It could be a September 2011 report commissioned by Sesame Workshop, which found that speech recognition technology has the potential to be both valuable and cost-effective when teaching literacy lessons.

Sesame Workshop’s Content Innovation Lab believes it can have the first products out within the next year, but tools that actually teach students how to read may take longer since they'll have to deal with addressing issues like mispronunciation.  

While all of this is pretty cool, it does bring to mind fears that classroom teachers can easily be replaced with technologies and pre-automated, scripted responses. While Grover and Elmo and the rest of the Sesame Street gang is beloved, nothing can replace a real reading session with parents or a classroom teacher.