Innovation
TalkingPoints is the only organization focusing on a technology-based solution to family engagement for under-resourced, multilingual communities. TalkingPoints is fundamentally redesigning how educators and families work together to build meaningful relationships in support of their students.
We are constantly improving our product and our model to make sure we have the greatest impact on student success in under-resourced communities.
Our approach
TalkingPoints leverages technology to provide a low-cost, scalable and impactful approach to tackle the barriers to family engagement. By harnessing cutting-edge technology like machine learning algorithms and natural language processing, we believe we can build a stronger family engagement practices and home-school connection in support of student success.
Innovation in improving translation quality
Continuously providing high-quality, understandable translations of messages between English-speaking educators and non-English-speaking families is central to removing language barriers to home-school connections and therefore critical to our mission. We believe we’re the only organization investing in education-specific translation, and our status as a nonprofit organization enables us to do so.
We take a multi-pronged approach to continuously enhancing translation quality.
Public machine translation
We use existing machine translation platforms available for baseline quality translation.
Human translators
Human translators support near-real-time translation and contribute high-quality data to train our own algorithms.
TalkingPoints machine translation
We train machine learning algorithms using our own data, which combines our conversation database with human translations to make it education-domain specific. We have also developed education-specific glossaries to enhance translations.
Help me understand
Educators and families can request human translator review of any translated communication (English or non-English) for any messages that may not be immediately understandable.
Innovation for accessibility
As a nonprofit committed to ensuring that our platform is able to serve the most under-resourced communities, and be accessible to all, we are working on:
Continued use of text messages
Mobile phones are ubiquitous even for under-resourced communities, although internet or device access may not be. We are committed to continuously providing text messages as a channel of communication to ensure all families have access to home-school connections.
Text to speech
Our family-facing mobile application allows for text-to-speech conversations, to reach and serve those families who may not be literate in their home languages.
Multimedia captioning (upcoming)
To further bridge home-school connections in the new hybrid-learning environment, we are working on multimedia translations and captioning using the latest technological innovations.
Innovation for building capacity
Based on the dual-capacity building framework for strong family-school partnerships, we believe in building capacity and knowledge, and empowering administrators, educators and families in a relevant, personalized and convenient way. What we’re working on to make it relevant and personalized:
Topic classification of conversations
Using natural language processing, we are investing in a topic categorization tool to understand the pulse and topic of conversations between educators and families. This will enable:
- Overview of how families are engaged with the school communities
- Data-driven decision-making and capacity-building for school systems
- Relevant and personalized in-app guidance and coaching