Clear, Easy-to-Understand Texts for Everyone Thanks to AI in the News App

At Édifice, we are committed to making our collaborative platforms, ONE and NEO, more accessible than ever. To ensure that every member of the educational community can fully understand important information, it is now possible to automatically simplify texts using artificial intelligence directly within the News app.

Whether it is students learning to read, children with cognitive difficulties, or parents who are non-native speakers, language and syntax barriers should never prevent clear communication between schools and families. This belief inspires the development of our smart writing assistant.

Inspired by Established Writing Methods

Our text simplification service is powered by generative AI guided by a prompt inspired by two recognized writing approaches: Plain Language and “Facile à lire et à comprendre”, a french easy-to-read technique.

Plain Language focuses on making messages as clear and effective as possible for the audience. This reader-centered approach is widely recognized and promoted by government institutions.

The second influence, “Facile à lire et à comprendre”, is originally developed for people with intellectual disabilities but proves highly effective for anyone with reading challenges, including students, non-native-speaking parents, dyslexic readers, or older adults. Simple words, short sentences and paragraphs, active voice—these methods generate practical writing guidelines to simplify information while preserving the meaning of the original message.

Thanks to this tool, teachers and school administrators can transform their messages into clear, accessible content for everyone with just one click. Our goal is to save valuable time for educational teams while ensuring that essential information reaches all audiences without exception.

Optimizing Readability

When simplifying a text, the AI is instructed to aim for a high readability score, specifically a Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score above 90. This method measures text complexity by analyzing sentence length (number of words) and word complexity (number of syllables per word).

Simply put: the longer the sentences and the more complex the words, the lower the readability score. Conversely, a high score indicates that the text is clear, fluent, and easy for the majority of readers to understand.

Our simplification tool combines this readability calculation with advanced rewriting techniques, producing texts that are often shorter but always easier to read.

AI as a Support, Never a Replacement

True to our vision of artificial intelligence, this tool is designed as a teaching assistant, not a replacement. Teachers remain fully in control of their content.

The process is simple and controlled:

• Write: Draft your article in the News app using the multimedia editor (minimum 200 characters to ensure meaningful simplification).

• Generate: Click the “Generate” button at the bottom of the editor to create a simplified version of your text.

• Choose freely: The AI-generated text appears in a separate panel, leaving your original content intact. You can copy all or part of it back into your article.

• Continuous improvement: Users can vote (thumbs up or down) to indicate whether the simplification is helpful, which helps us refine the tool.

If you update your original text, simply click the button again to refresh the simplified version instantly.

The next version of the News app brings even more exciting features for educators and school staff.