Ello, the AI studying companion that goals to help 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 function helps youngsters generate customized tales by selecting 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 house.
Children can choose from dozens of prompts, leading to 1000’s 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 learn how to pronounce a sure phrase, they’ll faucet on the query mark icon for further assist.
Storytime provides 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 primarily based on numerous themes and areas, similar to underwater adventures or enchanted forests. Different startups, like Scarlet Panda and Story Spark, have additionally joined in on this development.
Nonetheless, Ello believes its Storytime providing stands aside resulting from its proprietary, superior AI system that adapts to a toddler’s responses, educating important 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 consumer’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 contains the phrases “chair” and “cheer.”
In line with Ello, its engineering group applied security measures to make sure that the tales are appropriate for youngsters. 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 could 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 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 1000’s 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 price.
Moreover, Ello just lately made its library of decodable kids’s books on-line totally free.
