Automatic evaluation of spoken English fluency for recruitment purposes
We are super excited to announce the launch of our new spoken English fluency assessment web service. With the proliferation of international trade, e-commerce and the internet, fluency in spoken English is a must have skill for employees in any industry. According to a recent Harvard University study, when employees speak fluent English, corporations enjoy a global competitive edge, develop stronger customer relationships, and foster improved productivity in a distributed work force. Therefore, objectively measuring a future employees’ English speaking fluency has become an integral part of any recruitment process.
Accurately assessing English speaking skills during the recruitment process is an extremely cumbersome task. In addition to development of appropriate test content, assessment requires evaluation by native English speaking graders. Corporations typically end up spending 100s of thousands of dollars every year trying to perfect their assessment process.
With our new fluency assessment service, recruiters can submit a candidate’s audio/video speaking sample to the SpeechAce API which then automatically transcribes the audio and does further processing to estimate the pronunciation accuracy, fluency and hesitation in a candidate’s voice within a matter of seconds. What’s even better is that we have tested our web service with thousands of employees across a variety of call center and hospitality businesses. Our customers report tremendous improvements in the English speaking skills of new employees and significant reduction in costs and time in recruitment.
To facilitate trial of our new service, we have developed a speaking practice app, IELTSAce, which is in use by over 250,000 students world wide. This app allows students to prepare for the speaking section of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam, which is a gold standard for measuring English skills for recruitment, immigration and studies abroad.
The IELTSAce app provides IELTS speaking score (1-9) for both read-aloud and open ended speaking attempts. The test taker can first listen to an interview style question and then speak the sample answer that has been provided and review their IELTS score as shown below:
Alternatively, a test taker can press the “Hide Answer” button at the top and then speak their own answer developed spontaneously and obtain an immediate IELTS score along with their automatically transcribed audio as below:
Write to us at contact@speechace.com if you would like to learn more about our learnings in evaluating speaking skills for recruitment scenarios. We would love to hear from you!