Türkiye: Transforming special education through technology

Children with special educational needs, such as visual, motor and intellectual impairments or autism spectrum disorders regularly face challenges in accessing meaningful education. Traditional platforms often feature low-value content and fail to accommodate individual learning requirements, especially for young people with disabilities. This is compounded by limited resources in schools to deliver effective specialised education. Whilst technology has great potential in this area, existing applications largely fall short in offering truly personalised and accessible learning solutions.

With the goal of supporting underserved children, in the Eureka project Breaking Barriers, Turkish and Spanish companies, SESTEK and Smile and Learn, developed a new e-learning platform for children available in Turkish, English and Spanish. The platform includes 360-degree content, learning paths that adapt to users’ progress, advanced analytics and speech processing tools, all of which enhance accessibility and interactivity and tailor curricula to meet each child’s unique needs.

Participating in the Breaking Barriers project enabled us to collaborate with a valuable partner, highly regarded in its sector, and bring our speech technologies to inclusive education. It was a unique opportunity to convert our innovations into real-world impact and contribute to a more accessible learning experience for children with special needs.

Tuba Arslan Kir – Research, Development and Innovation Director at Sestek

The project greatly benefited from international collaboration, combining SESTEK’s expertise in speech technologies with Smile and Learn’s educational content and app development skills. A specific feature of the platform that was developed by SESTEK is its ability to recognise children’s vocal characteristics, like shorter vocal tracts, higher base, formant frequencies, variable pronunciation and speech speeds, with an accuracy rate of 96%. The speech recognition system was also customised to understand nonverbal cues, like sounds indicating approval or disapproval, from children with motor disabilities.

Meanwhile, the Smile and Learn team developed the infrastructure and educational content for the mobile applications on Windows, iOS and Android, integrating the speech recognition, speech synthesis and voice activity detection modules. The platform was tested in Spanish schools and received positive feedback from students, parents and teachers, affirming its social value and potential for broader adoption.

Because Breaking Barriers began shortly after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project team only met for the first time at Eureka’s annual event in Türkiye in 2024 on being nominated for an award. Despite this, facilitated by Eureka and Turkish funding agency, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK), the crossborder partnership supported knowledge sharing and visibility in the global education technology and speech technology sectors. For SESTEK, the project has laid the foundation for future commercial opportunities and market expansion.

Widespread application of the artificial intelligence driven e-learning platform could bring society a step closer to breaking learning barriers and attaining social inclusion for a diverse group of learners. For children with special educational needs, a fun platform that encourages meaningful learning has the potential to be life changing.