Now, students can improve their English with this skill on Amazon Alexa

This skill, now available on Amazon Alexa-supported devices, brings with it a whole collection of stories, fun facts, trivia, quizzes and rewards.

Amazon Alexa now has a new skill to help enhance students enhance their English vocabulary through listening and comprehension. The new skill, powered by publishing platform Pearson India and called MyPedia, is now available on all Amazon Echo smart speakers, Echo Show smart displays, and the Alexa app for smartphones. It brings with it a whole collection of stories, fun facts, trivia, quizzes and rewards that make English learning easy and fun.

The MyPedia skill is designed to enhance the interest of students in the English language. The stories used in the skill can inspire them to be authors and be imaginative while writing in English. The skill’s simple voice interface can enable students to learn in an interactive manner, at their own pace

To get started, enable the skill and say "Alexa, open MyPedia", or simply "Alexa, I want to learn English".

“Our teams are constantly working to add new features and experiences so that the Alexa voice service is more relevant and useful for users. Today we are delighted to add the capability of learning English with the Pearson MyPedia skill. The combination of interactive learning and the simplicity of voice interactions with Alexa will make this a fun experience for users of all age groups", said Puneesh Kumar, country manager for Alexa Experiences and Devices, Amazon India.

“We have worked with Amazon Alexa team to build Pearson MyPedia skill that will help learners improve their English language abilities through storytelling. The skill can supplement reading and writing of the English language in a new, effective, and fun way”, said Ramesh Subbarao, Vice President – Portfolio, South Asia, Pearson.

Nearly 200,000 Indians studied in US in 17-18; 5.4% rise over earlier years

The number of undergraduate students also went up by 6.2% to 23,346.

India is the second largest international reservoir for the US higher education institutions having sent 196,271 students here in the last academic year, according to latest data.

Their numbers continued to grow, with a 5.4 per cent increase in 2017-18 over the previous academic year, according to the Open Doors report from the State Department and the Institute of International Education.

In the other direction, 4,704 students went to study in India during 2016-17, latest period for which data is available. It was an increase of 12.5 per cent from the previous year.

The report said that there was a steep fall in the number of Indian students at the post-graduate level in the US. Their numbers came down by 8.8 per cent to 95,651 in 2017-18 compared to the previous year, while the number of students in practical training programmes after graduation shot up by 32 per cent to 75,390, according to the report.

The number of undergraduate students also went up by 6.2 per cent to 23,346.

Indians made up 17.9 per cent of total of 1,094,792 international students in the US last academic year.

China sent 363,341 students, the most of any country.

In 2016-17, there were 186,267 students from India in the US, a 24.9 per cent increase over the 165,918 the previous year.

During 2016-17, there were 21,977 students in undergraduate programmes, 104,899 in graduate courses and 57,132 in practical training programmes.

The State Department said international students contributed $42 billion to the US economy and supported 450,000 jobs.

Business Standard