Ello, the AI studying companion that goals to assist children struggling to learn, launched a brand new product on Monday that permits children to take part within the story-creation course of.
Known as “Storytime,” the brand new AI-powered characteristic helps children generate personalised tales by choosing from a choice of settings, characters, and plots. As an example, a narrative a couple of hamster named Greg who carried out in a expertise present in outer area.
Youngsters can choose from dozens of prompts, leading to hundreds of combos.
Like Ello’s common studying providing, the AI companion — a shiny blue, pleasant elephant — listens to the kid learn aloud and evaluates their speech to appropriate mispronunciations and missed phrases. If children are uncertain the right way to pronounce a sure phrase, they’ll faucet on the query mark icon for additional assist.
Storytime affords 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 software that generates animated tales for teenagers based mostly on varied themes and places, comparable to 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 as a consequence of its proprietary, superior AI system that adapts to a toddler’s responses, educating crucial studying expertise utilizing phonics-based methods. The corporate claims its expertise 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 carried out security measures to make sure that the tales are appropriate for youngsters. The corporate spent a number of months testing the product with lecturers, youngsters, and studying specialists. The preliminary model solely permits youngsters to select from a predetermined set of story choices. Nonetheless, the corporate envisions a future iteration the place youngsters can have much more involvement within the course of.
“If a trainer creates an open story with a toddler, they supply the [building blocks] by way of interactive dialog. So, I think about it will look fairly much like that,” Catalin Voss, co-founder and CTO of Ello, advised TechCrunch. “Youngsters desire some guardrails at some degree. It’s the clean paper drawback. You ask a five-year-old, ‘What would you like the story to be about?’ And so they sort of get overwhelmed.”
Along with Storytime, the corporate additionally launched its iOS app just a few 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 extra value.
Moreover, Ello just lately made its library of decodable youngsters’s books on-line without spending a dime.
