An Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based software that helps read and comprehend any material in English has improved learning outcomes for an estimated one million Indian students across eight Indian States in 2016-17. The product, developed by Indian-American entrepreneur Venkat Srinivasan, is set to roll out in 1,00,000 Indian schools, covering at least 15 million children in 2018.
The U.S. Agency for International Funding and Mr. Srinivasan’s company EnglishHelper funded the 2016-17 expansion with support from some corporate social responsibility funds and high net worth individuals. “EnglishHelper is going to fund the 2018 roll out target of 1,00,000 schools ourselves,” Mr. Srinivsan said.
Mr. Srinivasan, a Chennai-born, Chartered Accountant-turned-AI-enthusiast, has built a number of companies, all harnessing the potential of AI. His company Rage Frameworks was acquired by Genpact in 2017 for an undisclosed amount.
Entrepreneurship has brought him immense wealth, but Mr. Srinivasan prefers to call himself a “social entrepreneur”. “Social enterprise for me is measuring success by impact, not profit. These are for profit businesses, but they are built and designed for impact,” Mr. Srinivasan, a philanthropist, said.
EnglishHelper machine reads the existing textbooks as they are, and develops them into more effective teaching material. “The programme trains itself on the curriculum-prescribed textbook. It then assists the teacher to focus on ensuring that students are learning and enables students to learn,” Mr. Srinivasan told The Hindu in an interview.
“A major advantage of this AI intervention is that it is within the current infrastructure and implemented by the current teachers,” he said, noting that one major limitation of most social interventions is that they come with their proprietary content and methods which makes scaling them very difficult. “…not to mention the significant change management involved”.
Hardware challenge
The hardware that this programme needs is a basic tablet or a laptop and a projector. Many schools have these, though a majority of them do not. IL & FS Education and Technology Services, an arm of Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services, has a hardware product called K-Yan, which is a projector and a computer rolled into one. It is installed in schools that do not have infrastructure already for this project.
The rollout until now has been of ReadToMe, a segment of the EnglishHelper, where the focus is on reading. “The programme has been designed for the Indian context, and it has an Indian accent called Sangeetha. “It has to be Indian ‘Ram’, not the American ‘Ram’,” explained Mr. Srinivasan. “The machine reads to students, and students read to the machine. Teachers can navigate the process.”
Finding quality teachers, particularly in rural areas, is a big challenge for India’s education planners, and this technology “could solve the last mile problem”, Mr. Srinivasan said. The company is in talks with several State governments for expanding the programme. The next stage in the technology is IntelligentTeacher, which will learn how a particular child learns.
“IntelligentTeacher will adapt teaching to the specific situation, let’s say, by introducing more visuals, or more explanations,” said Mr. Srinivasan. “The idea is to work with the natural interest and curiosity of the learner, within the curriculum, but that will be beyond the mere teaching of the existing textbooks.” Another programme called WritingAssistant will help students write.
What drives Mr. Srinivasan is the immense possibility of social intervention through “AI-driven automation.” “The question is how to ensure that the technology works in a preset context. So, IntelligentTeacher is outside the realm of AI in many respects. It is AI that will work seamlessly in an existing school,” he said.
