AI and natural language processing are here to change the IELTS prep game!

IELTS test aspirants, over the years, have been confounded by how to self-assess their writing and speaking skills. It is not as if you can have a certified tutor available at hand all the time. But thanks to natural language processing and artificial intelligence, you now won't need a tutor! All you need is a smartphone and you can have a ready-to-assess companion in the shape of MyIELTS Partner. The app and web-based platform provide real-time assistance using the above mentioned technologies. EdexLive caught up with founders Nithya Gopinathan and Roshan R Pillai to learn what sets the company apart from other services that coach aspirants in English language skills. 

As both Nithya and Roshan have over six years of experience as IELTS trainers, knowing the prerequisites of an aspirant when it comes to English training is something that they know inside out. When fazed by the roadblock of coaching users' writing and speaking skills, they knew firsthand that brute manpower would not go a long way. They were quick to address that gap using tech means, which is weird in a way since neither of them has a tech background!  "There are so many tools that have come up to help people with their writing and paraphrasing. But there are very few platforms that directly train people and guide them so that they know how to improve. One of the great shifts that I have seen is that youngsters find it very difficult to pen something down on their own without automated tools to assist them," says Nithya, when asked about the recent trends observed in language learning spheres. 

One of the fields that has the training centres stymied is the speaking test. The question on everyone's lips was how to provide on-the-spot scores to someone taking the speaking test. Until now that is. MyIELTS Partner has decoded the way to do this using AI. "One thing we wanted to address was to make our service inclusive in terms of people having different accents while speaking English. We have been able to teach the machine different accents by feeding it different audio samples so that every user is evaluated fairly and assigned a proper score," replies Nithya when asked about the feature that is one of their unique selling propositions.

The above feature makes the service a well-rounded one that is a one-stop-shop for anyone wanting to gain academic proficiency in English. "The natural language processing technology allows the machine to check if the speaker is actually answering the question they have been asked," says Roshan, talking about how speakers are assessed in real-time. 

The service's exclusive online mode of delivery allows its creators to cut down on costs as well. This makes them cost-effective when compared to physical mode training institutes.