The WGI Worldwide Company and General Electric on Tuesday announced the launch of Lyra, a new app-based education platform that uses innovative advanced speech recognition and touch screen analysis to teach reading and writing. It was co-developed by WGI and GE.
This is made known to Financial Street through a statement by an official of GE, Annette Mutuku.
The app represents the start of WGI’s transition to a digital provider of literacy and makes learning literacy skills more accessible to adults and children. The app’s 26 modules are based on the evidence-based synthetic phonics approach to literacy and built on the foundation of WGI’s six years of in-person education.
The Chairman/Founder of WGI, Chance Wilson, said, “We realised that while there will never be enough teachers, there are enough mobile devices, and they are already in the hands of people who can benefit from literacy training.
“We worked quickly to bring on new teachers and set up programmes in new communities. We wanted to do more given the urgent need.”
Wilson, who set up WGI six years ago as a 14-year-old middle school student, is passionate about bringing literacy to as many people as possible. At first, he set up in-person classes in his hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Once established there, he set about developing plans for national and global impact, which eventually saw a partnership with GE blossom through GE’s global network of volunteers and software developers.
Now, Wilson and GE are aligned that moving into the digital world could not be more important.
President/Chief Executive Officer of GE Global, Nabil Habayeb, who is championing the partnership, said: “Looking at the potential this app has to make impact around the world, GE is fully supportive of this effort. With so many people isolated and in need of developing new skills, Lyra can help meet a critical demand in underserved communities that have little or no access to literacy resources – a situation made even more dire in the wake of COVID-19.”
Globally, more than 700m people can neither read nor write. This limits their ability to gain employment, improve career prospects, or pursue higher education. It also can have a far-reaching impact on mental health.
Lyra features an engaging space-themed interface and user experience. The theme reflects the name of the app – Lyra, which is the brightest constellation in the night sky. It teaches letters and words by presenting them on the screen, pronouncing them, and then inviting users to say the letters and words out loud. Powerful voice recognition technology then analyses the response.
The app also uses the phone’s touch screen to prompt learners to write the letters or words they are studying, then analyses the results to tell them whether or not the writing is correct.
