Ello, the AI studying companion that goals to assist youngsters struggling to learn, launched a brand new product on Monday that enables youngsters to take part within the story-creation course of.
Referred to as “Storytime,” the brand new AI-powered characteristic helps youngsters generate customized tales by selecting from a number of settings, characters, and plots. For example, a narrative a couple of hamster named Greg who carried out in a expertise present in outer house.
Children can choose from dozens of prompts, leading to hundreds of combos.
Like Ello’s common studying providing, the AI companion — a vibrant blue, pleasant elephant — listens to the kid learn aloud and evaluates their speech to appropriate mispronunciations and missed phrases. If youngsters are uncertain easy methods to pronounce a sure phrase, they’ll faucet on the query mark icon for additional assist.
Storytime presents two studying choices: one mode the place Ello and the reader take turns and one other, simpler mode for youthful readers the place Ello does a lot of the studying.
AI-assisted story creation for teenagers isn’t a brand new idea. In 2022, Amazon launched its personal AI device that generates animated tales for teenagers based mostly on varied themes and areas, reminiscent of underwater adventures or enchanted forests. Different startups, like Scarlet Panda and Story Spark, have additionally joined in on this pattern.
Nonetheless, Ello believes its Storytime providing stands aside resulting from its proprietary, superior AI system that adapts to a toddler’s responses, educating essential studying abilities utilizing phonics-based methods. The corporate claims its know-how outperforms OpenAI’s Whisper and Google Cloud’s speech API.
As well as, the Storytime expertise is tailor-made to the person’s studying degree in addition to the weekly lesson. For instance, if Ello helps a first-grader follow their “ch” sound that week, the AI creates a narrative that strategically consists of the phrases “chair” and “cheer.”
In line with Ello, its engineering workforce applied security measures to make sure that the tales are appropriate for kids. The corporate spent a number of months testing the product with academics, kids, and studying specialists. The preliminary model solely permits kids to select from a predetermined set of story choices. Nonetheless, the corporate envisions a future iteration the place kids can have much more involvement within the course of.
“If a teacher creates an open story with a child, they provide the [building blocks] through interactive dialog. So, I imagine it would look quite similar to that,” Catalin Voss, co-founder and CTO of Ello, informed TechCrunch. “Kids prefer some guardrails at some level. It’s the blank paper problem. You ask a five-year-old, ‘What do you want the story to be about?’ And they kind of get overwhelmed.”
Along with Storytime, the corporate additionally launched its iOS app a number of months in the past, increasing the attain of its AI studying coach to much more customers. It was beforehand restricted to tablets, together with iPads, Android tablets, and Amazon.
With over 700,000 books learn and tens of hundreds of households served, Ello is priced at $14.99/month. In the meantime, households receiving authorities help can entry it for simply $2.99/month. Ello additionally companions with low-income faculties to supply the subscription at no further value.
Moreover, Ello lately made its library of decodable kids’s books on-line at no cost.
