"My True Voice" is a Carnegie Mellon University project with a solid basis in teaching and research in the Drama Department and in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) of the university's School of Computer Science. The project's goal is to give young students a clear, efficient manner of speaking, which they can utilize as they need it. Natalie Baker, Professor of Drama at Carnegie Mellon, has developed a full curriculum to teach the Standard American English Dialect and has been using this with her students.
Wanting more people to benefit from this, she decided to create a project that would combine basic coursework with complementary practice on the computer. She contacted Dr. Maxine Eskenazi, a Systems Scientist in the Language Technologies Institute who has been developing "Fluency," a system that detects and helps correct pronunciation errors of foreign language learners. The project, dubbed "My True Voice," was under way! Through support from the Extra Mile Foundation and Carnegie Mellon, the project's first milestone goal was to give a one-semester class to the fifth graders of Holy Rosary School, a Catholic inner-city elementary school that enrolls mostly economically disadvantaged, non-Catholic, African-American children in the Homewood area of Pittsburgh. Natalie developed a new sophomore drama course, Speech and Phonetics, Instruction and Outreach (SPIOC), made sets of exercises and Maxine adapted her software for fifth graders using the exercises. The spring semester '00 course sees Natalie, her students, and the software in action every Friday morning at Holy Rosary. The project will expand to two more Diocese elementary schools during the '00-'01 school year.

"My True Voice" has been sponsored by

The Drama Department
The Language Technologies Institute
Grants from the Extra Mile Foundation
Carnegie Mellon's Center for University Outreach
The Grable Foundation
The Buhl Foundation
T he Frick Education Foundation
The Gumberg Family Foundation.