Patent ID: 8036896

Claim:
An apparatus for providing language and literacy tutoring information to a user, the apparatus comprising: a plurality of acoustic models stored in an acoustic model data set; and a processor programmed to: present to the user, via an application, text to be read aloud by the user; process speech data resulting from the user's reading of the text aloud by; evaluating the speech data using at least two acoustic models of said plurality of acoustic models to generate speech recognition data for each of the at least two acoustic models; determining which of the at least two acoustic models provides most accurate speech recognition results for the speech data and selecting a most accurate acoustic model based on the determining; and evaluating reading performance of the user by comparing the text to results of a speech recognition process performed on the speech data using the most accurate acoustic model; and present feedback to the user on the user's reading performance, wherein the processor is programmed to determine which of the at least two acoustic models provides most accurate speech recognition results for the speech data at least by: based at least in part on results of the evaluating of the speech data using the at least two acoustic models and on data regarding historical success rates of each of the at least two acoustic models evaluating previously-received speech data of the user, determining a success rate for each of the at least two acoustic models; and selecting, as the most accurate acoustic model, an acoustic model having a highest success rate.