How do students speak their answers?
Turn on 'Speak answers' for a task, and students can talk instead of typing. Their words are transcribed into the conversation.
Students can speak their answers instead of typing them. They hold the microphone while they talk, their words are transcribed into the conversation, and everything after that is the same as if they had typed: the tutor asks its next question, you read the transcript, and the AI evaluation assesses the same words.
It helps the students for whom typing is the specific obstacle rather than the thinking. This could include younger classes, individuals who are slower at typing or have a specific learning challenge and students who are still building their written English.
Turning it on and using it
If a student cannot speak their answer
The microphone is greyed out. Your school has speaking turned off. A coordinator can change that under Students speaking answers in the school settings.
Microphone blocked. The browser is refusing access. The student gets a How to turn it back on link in the conversation, which opens How to unblock your microphone. Unblock it before a secure-mode task starts, because leaving the page during the task locks the student out.
We can’t hear anything. The microphone is allowed but silent, usually muted in hardware or in use by another app.
Good to know
Speaking is available in Discussion and Defence Mode tasks. It is not yet in Draft Mode.
The audio is transcribed and discarded. We do not store the recording, and there is no voice on file for any student.