Getting started with Reading Coach

Reading Coach is a free tool that provides personalized, engaging, consistent and independent reading fluency practice. Reading Coach uses artificial intelligence and built-in fluency detection to personalize reading content with the words learners struggle with, while ensuring a safe and trusted experience. Reading Coach is available for use in the classroom or at home with a Microsoft account. Reading Coach is currently available in US-English, with support for additional languages and dialects coming in 2024.

This public preview of Reading Coach showcases the product team’s commitment to continuously evolve with user feedback. The team is dedicated to identifying bugs or experience improvements at this stage to deliver a high-quality product that meets user needs.

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How to access Reading Coach

School IT Administrators and technology team: Enable the Reading Coach preview for your whole school or district by signing up and accessing instructions here: Reading Coach School Preview Sign-up. Once the application has been enabled, educators and students will be able to use Reading Coach with their school email address.

Educators and students: Your school's IT Administrators or technology team needs to enable the application for your use. If the app has already been enabled for your classes, get started at the Learning Accelerators for individual practice webpage. Educators may also join the Reading Coach community here: Join the educator community.

Parents: Get started at the Learning Accelerators for individual practice webpage. Parents will be invited to join the Reading Coach community as part of signing up. To learn more about the community or join as an existing user, go to Learn more about the Reading Coach community.

As part of signing in, you will have the option to download the Windows app or use the application on the web.

To directly download the Windows app, visit the Microsoft Store.

About Reading Coach

Reading Coach offers three reading modes: Create a story, Read from a library, and Add your own. Create a story puts the story in a reader’s hands by giving them the choice of a character, setting and reading level to create a unique AI-generated story each time. The AI-generated story is checked and safeguarded against hateful language, self-harm, violence, profanity, explicit language, and is leveled to be age-appropriate. 

As learners read a story out aloud, speech-to-text artificial intelligence analyzes their reading fluency, detects words they found challenging, and records the reader’s accuracy, words per minute, and time spent reading. Reading Coach provides targeted word practice after each practice session with tools that help learners gain confidence as they work through challenging words. The core reading practice experience in Reading Coach is based on Reading Progress and Reading Coach in Microsoft Teams, which has been expert- validated and educator- vetted. For details, see this page.

The story content is moderated for quality, safety, and age appropriateness following Microsoft’s Responsible AI guidelines. Readers get to choose what happens in each story chapter, charting their own reading journey through the story. Words they found challenging in the previous chapter are automatically included in the next chapter. This makes the practice immediately adaptive. Effort-focused badges and the ability to unlock new characters and settings for the next story keeps learners engaged in the flow of reading, motivating even reluctant readers.  

Learners can also choose from a curated library of Lexile-leveled, fiction and non-fiction passages from ReadWorks, a non-profit organization dedicated to the science of reading. Alternatively, learners can paste in their own reading passage or word list and read it out aloud. In each of these reading modes, the reading is analyzed for fluency and the practice is scaffolded with challenge word coaching. 

Responsible practices for generative AI

For the Create a story feature, several principles and guardrails are in place to ensure Responsible AI practices. At no point is student data used to train the underlying models.

The process used for story generation is moderated extensively for quality, safety, and age appropriateness following Microsoft's guidelines. Reading Coach uses Azure AI Content Safety for detecting and filtering story content for hate, profanity, self-harm, sexual or explicit language and violence. In addition, a safeguarding word list filters inappropriate contextual use of words related to unsafe content for children, politics, specific cultural practices and so on. The dedicated content moderation models in Azure Cognitive Services also check for sexually suggestive and offensive content.

At times, a generated chapter may or may not be fully coherent with the rest of the story. The Reading Coach preview uses beta software for text generation, and the quality will be continuously improved to ensure a great experience.

Data handling

Three kinds of data are created as a part of the Reading Coach experience: voice data, AI-generated story data, and usage data. For school accounts, all data is stored in association with a student’s Microsoft school Entra ID, owned by the tenant, and protected according to the policies applicable to all data associated with a tenant identity. For personal, non-school accounts, a user’s data is stored in association with their consumer Microsoft account and protected in conformance with policies applicable to a consumer identity.

Most of this data is not stored or accessible in a personally identifiable way by Microsoft. The app does collect limited, non-identifying user data to facilitate learners keeping track of their reading achievements and progressing over time.

Voice data
- The voice data is processed only on a user’s device, during the out-loud reading of text to identify pronunciation errors. It is not stored or shared with Microsoft afterwards.
AI generated story data
- The story data that is created is only available to the student, and is stored and associated with their student ID. It is not shared with Microsoft. There is no way for the student to include any personal information about themselves when creating the story. In compliance with Microsoft's Responsible AI standards, the story cannot include any individually identifiable information, and the content is fully moderated, safe and age appropriate.
Usage data
- The usage data associated with a student, such as their reading over time, as well as non-identifying usage statistics like general location (city, state), is accessible only to them.