Des dictées produites par une intelligence artificielle

The French Minister of Education recently reaffirmed the importance of dictation. But did you know that this venerable exercise can take advantage of the latest advances in artificial intelligence? In doing so, it is possible to offer students differentiated dictations to be listened to in MP3 format and written, naturally, by hand.

How can this be done? Here are some explanations.

1. Ask chatGPT to generate text for you. Specify in your prompt all the constraints you wish to include in your dictation: verbal tenses, vocabulary words, desired difficulty, number of lines, etc.
2. To differentiate the exercise, ask the AI to produce two other versions of the dictation. For example, a similar dictation but much more difficult containing this or that grammar point or those rare or complex words. Or, on the contrary, a simplified version that is more attainable for a student who may have difficulties with their command of the language. You can even ask the AI to produce a cloze dictation like the one proposed for the “brevet des collèges” for students with special needs.
3. Use another AI to convert the dictation to audio format. You can use a free site like TTSMaker which, among other options, allows you to change the speed of the voice, add pauses, choose the language (French, English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese…). You can even include punctuation by spelling out “comma” or “full stop”.
4. If by any chance you want your own voice to be heard, you can clone it. As you can see in this video, you can even make the President of the Republic sing Charles Aznavour. But let’s admit that this last point is a bit worrying.
5. You still need to share your dictations in audio format. Ask your students to bring their favorite headphones, a piece of paper and a pen and write under the AI dictation.
6. But what does the teacher do during this time? Well, while some students are being subjected to the equivalent of a Pivot dictation concocted by an artificial intelligence, the teacher can work with a small group of students on a point of spelling to be corrected or clarified.

In this way, technology can be used to quickly create content, but also to provide differentiated activities and encourage independent work. This frees up teacher time to focus on helping students who need it most. Of course, a rotation system dear to Catlin Tucker can allow time to be devoted to all students, moving from dictation workshop to teacher-led workshop.