Amira helps millions of students master reading with the Science of Reading and Claude

Amira Learning uses Claude to power key new features of their AI reading technology, helping millions of students develop reading comprehension skills and background knowledge through individualized, conversational learning experiences.

With Claude’s assistance, Amira:

• Listens to and understands students with any accent or dialect. Amira has listened to more than 10 billion words read aloud worldwide.
• Decides, in the moment, how to coach a student, providing hundreds of science-based interventions that support reading growth.
• Implements voice-based AI dialogues and comprehension conversations for elementary students

Advancing Comprehension: A Complex but Critical Step in Reading Development

As Ran Liu, Chief AI Scientist at Amira, explains, “Reading proficiency is a critical challenge in education, with millions of students struggling to develop the comprehension skills essential for academic and life success.”

Amira addressed this challenge by designing an AI-powered reading assessment and personal tutoring technology with advanced children’s speech recognition. While Amira excelled for years at teaching foundational word recognition skills, opportunities remained to enhance instruction and tutoring on comprehension—understanding meaning, making inferences, and connecting ideas—and knowledge building through reading.

"When LLMs emerged, we saw an opportunity to expand our AI capabilities to teach reading comprehension in a dynamic and natural way, just like an expert human tutor would,” said Liu. The challenge was to create AI that could engage students in sophisticated educational conversations about texts while maintaining strict safety standards for young learners. This required intersecting cutting-edge technology with deep pedagogical expertise.

Why Amira chose Claude

Amira selected Claude after rigorous testing revealed its superior performance for educational applications. "We conducted extensive benchmarking across a variety of commercial and open-source models and found that Claude performed exceptionally well," said Liu. The model consistently earned high scores from human content experts who evaluated the quality and educational value of its generated dialogues, making it the clear choice for Amira.

In Amira's selection process, safety was equally important. Liu noted, "We know Anthropic prioritizes safety and accuracy in their models. Amira operates on private, secure AI systems. The data students generate stays within our secure infrastructure and is not accessible by external AI providers. When a student uses Amira, their data is never shared with or used to train any public AI models or third-party foundation models,” emphasizing how critical this is when developing technology for young students.

Claude's leading language capabilities further distinguished it from competitors. Liu explained, "Claude has consistently performed well with language tasks, making it well-suited for the dialogues that power comprehension tutoring in Amira.”

How Claude powers Amira's reading comprehension

Amira uses Claude to enhance reading comprehension in several ways:

• Generating comprehension dialogues: Claude powers experiences where Amira asks students thoughtful questions about passages they've read, focusing on skills aligned with educational and state standards.
• Content analysis: Claude analyzes texts to match specific comprehension skills with appropriate passages. For example, it might select a story with a vivid and rich setting to exercise the skill of explaining the influence of the setting on the plot.
• Creating instructional content: Claude generates questions, hints, and response pathways that maintain pedagogical rigor while ensuring an individualized learning experience.

Amira also implemented a structured approach for safety. "We have a closed loop system where we have dozens of possible responses that Amira can give after each turn, and the LLM selects the best one in response to the student, but everything is pre-generated and reviewed offline," Liu explained. “This approach allows for a dynamic and engaging conversational experience while ensuring consistent educational quality and strict safety standards essential for young learners. Amira is FERPA-compliant, and we are committed to protecting student data. We do not send identifiable student information to any external machine learning services.”

Transforming reading education with AI-powered conversations

Claude has strengthened Amira’s ability to develop students’ comprehension skills through responsive, research-based instruction. Teachers have shared enthusiastic feedback about how effectively Amira engages with students and adapts to their needs in real time. Liu noted, "Teachers are amazed that Amira can understand and respond to their students appropriately. It makes students feel heard and provides excellent modeling of responses."

Multiple independent research studies demonstrate that Amira drives far greater reading growth than other leading reading technologies. Students reading with Amira experience 70% faster reading growth and a minimum of 7+ extra weeks of growth in one school year.

For students, these AI-powered dialogues provide scaffolding where they need improvement, helping them build understanding of specific passages while developing broader comprehension skills.

Building the future of AI in education

Liu envisions AI supporting educators rather than replacing human teaching, noting "We need to work closely with teachers, administrators, and literacy coaches – the people who are closest to the students. AI should assist teachers, and teachers’ needs should drive the use cases of AI."

Amira plans to continue enhancing their technology with Claude's capabilities, particularly by training the LLM to exercise more Science of Reading expertise. Liu shared, "Developing a Claude model with deep science of reading expertise would be transformative," noting this could significantly enhance multiple aspects of the product.

By combining the science of reading with the power of AI, Amira and Claude are equalizing access to effective literacy instruction and opening doors for millions of young students. In a world where literacy is fundamental to success, this collaboration embodies the promise of educational equity through the thoughtful application of AI.