SoapBox Labs awarded anti-bias AI certification

Irish speech recognition company SoapBox Labs has been awarded the first product certification to an educational technology company that focuses on equity in the design of artificial intelligence systems.

The product certification, Prioritising Racial Equity in AI Design, serves as an important indicator for education stakeholders and families that products recognise the importance of mitigating racial bias in new learning tools and technologies.

The award is a world-first for the certification, which was launched in August. It requires a rigorous auditing process, and SoapBox Labs is the first company to be awarded it.

“It’s incredibly significant for us that we are the first organisation to get through this certification,” said chief executive Martyn Farrows. “We’ve been committed to this from the outset. We take a privacy-by-design approach; everything we do has to respect the fundamental digital privacy rights of kids. But we also have always taken an equity-by-design approach; in other words, everything we do has to be with a mission of ensuring that the infrastructure, the engine, the models that we build, are accessible to everybody in education who wants to use a system. It’s a fundamentally different approach to going about this stuff.”

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Mr Farrows said the company’s ambition was to be “bias free”, and that it would be an ongoing project.

“The whole point of certification is to look in-depth at your internal processes and how you are actually proactively going about this, so that you are providing equity across these different cohorts and demographics,” he said. “That’s the really satisfying thing from our point of view, because we’ve been doing this for years, and it’s great that now there’s a recognition of that. What we would hope is that this will provide inspiration for others to also look at how they go about building these systems and actually adopt the same equity-by-design approach.”

The certification is awarded by the global non-profit Digital Promise, which was set up more than a decade ago to ensure that the promise of technology delivers for children.

“AI has tremendous promise to impact learning, especially for supporting teachers and learners who are furthest from opportunity,” said Vic Vuchic, chief strategy officer at Digital Promise. “That said, AI can have bias that impacts certain populations disproportionately. That is why Digital Promise is so excited to partner with the Edtech Equity Project to signal critical design best practices that can mitigate these biases for educators and learners of colour. This product certification will help educators and learners find products that are committed to implementing these best practices and focused on making sure AI works for learners of colour.”

The Edtech Equity Project, which specifically looks at equity as it applies to educational technology, is also supporting the certification.

“This award not only recognises Soapbox Labs’ commitment to racial equity but also constitutes a meaningful step forward for the edtech industry,” said Nidhi Hebbar, co-founder of the Edtech Equity Project. “[Fellow co-founder] Madison Jacobs and I are thrilled to see SoapBox Labs deliver best-in-class voice-enabled technology that sets a high standard for the industry by investing in the critical work required to ensure their AI works well for learners of colour.”