Development of a Personal Digital Assistant for a Reading Fluency Assessment Tool

Fluency in reading is an essential component of literacy and can be considered a predictor of text comprehension. The ability to read and write is a necessary condition for learning all posterior knowledge throughout the educational journey. Initiatives to assess fluency have emerged to help address the literacy crisis in Brazil, but most of them consume significant resources and time, as they mainly involve manual methods. To tackle this challenge, the use of a platform for automatic fluency assessment using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms is suggested, along with the combined use of a device developed for reading assessment purposes. Such a device can be categorized as an IoT device and aims to accurately evaluate reading fluency in a more efficient and resource-friendly manner, allowing high volume application of fluency assessment. This work describes the development of a personal digital assistant (PDA) designed to be used as a tool for audio collection for an automatic fluency assessment platform.