Voice for Learning with Rabbi Elijah Dordek

VFH Episode 54

In this episode, Teri welcomes Rabbi Elijah Dordek, the founder and CEO of the ShanenLi Speech Recognition app.

Rabbi Dordek is a pioneer when it comes to voice technology and using voice applications to help people learn things. ShanenLi is an interactive tutor that helps students, young and old, to achieve literacy and master memory, using Automatic Speech Recognition. It guides users to practice reading, reciting and memorizing.

Currently featuring Pirke Avot (Classic Hebrew Text), the user listens to each paragraph and can follow along as each line lights up when read. When proficient, the user reads aloud and is tested. The recitation is marked in color for errors to enhance self-correction. Stars are earned according to score, along with sound effects and words of encouragement. The user can share their progress with others.

Key points from Rabbi Elijah Dordek!

Helping people learn religious texts through the ShanenLi app.
How the technology can be applied in medical education for medical students that need to learn and memorize tons of information, and as a tool to help determine and become proficient in ways of communicating with patients.

Background

He is based out of Jerusalem, Israel.
He studied Judaism at a deeper level and decided to abandon his plans to go to MIT and become a teacher/educator.
Through his studies (Oral Law of the Torah), he ended up developing systems for helping people learn the same. He also looked at how he could use technology to create an interactive way through which people could learn and master large or small bodies of text.
He’s also a trained psychotherapist.

Introduction to Voice Technology

Being involved in the Oral Law of Torah (which is meant to be known by heart), he wanted to find ways to help those who were struggling with their studies of the Oral Law. He printed books that visually put the texts in the Oral Law in such a way that people could learn much more easily.
While thinking about how he could use technology to achieve the goal of helping people learn, he came up with the idea of using voice to have a conversation between man and machine, where the machine would be able to present the text and line by line help the user hear it and repeat it until they had gained proficiency.

Voice for Learning with Rabbi Elijah Dordek

The Technology at the Root of the Technology

They have the ShanenLi Speech Recognition app which is in the Play Store and it’s primarily in Hebrew, but they’re trying to grow out into other languages. The backend for this app is the Google speech recognition API.
A great user case example would be someone who is scheduled to do a TED Talk and they have to know their talk by heart. It might not be the easiest thing to do, but the technology can help this person achieve that more quickly, easily, and in a pleasurable way.

The Evolution

He believes we’ve come a long way to getting machines to do what we want, but that it’s not there yet because the conversations are not flowing.
He believes machines will progress gradually to get there in the future.

How the Technology Can Impact Healthcare

He knows of a company that created a voice application that analyzes the voice for health issues. It can help a doctor find if someone has a health issue just from their voice.
He believes and has high hopes that anything we can humanly define, we can then somehow ask a computer to search for.