Speech EdTech company SoapBox Labs has received an AI product certification. These product certifications serve as rigorous, reliable signals for education companies, school administrators, educators, and families looking to select technology that was designed to intentionally meet learners' authentic and variable needs. Speech technology company SoapBox Labs is the first company to receive the Prioritizing Racial Equity in AI Design Product Certification. SoapBox Labs' voice technology has been designed specifically for kids' unique speech patterns and powers some of the most widely used digital learning tools for literacy and language instruction and assessment across all grades PreK-12. "This award not only recognizes SoapBox Labs' commitment to racial equity but also constitutes a meaningful step forward for the edtech industry," said Nidhi Hebbar, co-founder of the Edtech Equity Project.

GOFA, the creators of a new AI-powered EdTech app, Luca & Friends, are hoping their app will encourage children to improve their fitness and learn about STEM through the metaverse. Luca & Friends aims to be the first app of its kind to combine learning and fitness and is designed for kids ages 4-8. The app provides an interactive and immersive learning experience in which kids play games by using basic movements like stretch or jump to touch or catch the right answers. Kids build strength, endurance, coordination, and flexibility while practicing English and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) skills. "In an age where kids are spending more time in front of their screens, we have created a way to make that time for active fun and learning," said Wayne Chung, CEO of GOFA, creators of Luca & Friends.

The initiative – which has been welcomed by global technology companies including Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft – is led by the education and technology not-for-profit, Jisc, and supported by innovation-focused universities and colleges throughout the UK. It will initially be staffed by a dedicated team of seven AI experts, plus consultants and partners from industry and education. The National Centre supports the government's AI Strategy, which the digital secretary, Oliver Dowden, announced in March, saying: "Unleashing the power of AI is a top priority". Yet while AI is predicted to increase our national GDP by 10.3% by 2030, and despite Office for Artificial Intelligence estimates that AI could boost productivity in some industries by 30%, a lack of investment in AI for education is endangering the UK's global competitiveness. Nationally, we are yet to meaningfully embed technology within higher and further education.

As an educator I sought to understand the very meaning of the concept of AI and all the associated terminology that is supposedly at the forefront of educational technology disruption. At first, it seemed like rocket science to me, so I sought to find someone who would breakdown this concept to me and why I should be interested in it as an educator. Unfortunately this search proved futile at first. So I took up a personal challenge to seek to gain understanding in a way that I could share it with a child, as Albert Einstein once said, "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself…", meaning that if you are incapable of explaining it simply then you don't understand it well enough. In a simple form, it is a software imitating human capabilities and the understanding of how the world around us works.

The course enables novice practitioners who are interested in entering the field of AI to become job-ready engineers in just six months. There will be a skill assessment to evaluate the student's current skills and experience, but the only prerequisites are a basic understanding of mathematics and statistics and, or alternatively, relevant experience in the industry, such as an internship. According to the 2020 IT Skills and Salary Report, 'AI, cognitive computing and machine learning' was reported as the second weakest IT skillset in organisations across the world, presenting serious hiring challenges for IT managers.[1] The lack of skilled AI professionals forms part of a broader technology skills shortage in Australia, with new research commissioned by AWS revealing that Australia will require an additional 6.5 million newly-skilled and reskilled digital workers by 2025 to meet future demand for technology skills (79 per cent more than Australia currently has). Jon Lang, CEO of AIICT said, "We're seeing a severe shortage of skilled AI professionals and in many instances, organisations are simply unable to fill these roles. With AI and ML becoming a critical part of the digital transformation process for many organisations, the demand is on the rise for engineers with these specific skills across a wide range of industries."

This has been released in response to a notable uptick in inbound communications for school districts across the nation. "Chatbot itself isn't a new concept--but one designed specifically to address the needs of educational leaders and their stakeholders is," said K12 Insight's Founder and CEO Suhail Farooqui, who has been intimately involved in the conception and design of Let's Talk! Assistant. "We've used our more than a decade of experience in the K-12 space and data from hundreds of school districts across the nation to create a chatbot that really meets the needs of everyone in the educational community." Accessible via a widget on a school district's website, Let's Talk! Assistant gives parents, students, and others a fast, easy way to get answers to frequently asked questions whenever their schedules allow--24 hours a day, seven days a week. An additional in-chat option enables families to submit more nuanced or complex inquiries directly to staff members for a timely response, ensuring an answer to every question.

For many of us, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) provide some nostalgia back to the Skynet taking over human civilization or the rise of self-aware robots that look like Will Smith. And for many years, Hollywood has dramatized AI and painted a scary perception of the possibilities of what this type of technology can become – but luckily for us this is still somewhat a pipe dream. That being said, this does not mean that AI isn't already all around us. To put it simply, Artificial Intelligence is a sequence of algorithms (code) that run repeatedly aiming to predict and complete complex tasks in the matter of seconds. Additionally, Machine Learning is the data set(s) and information being collected which allows a large majority of AI technology to function.