Everyday Reader Club

An app that helps low-literacy adults improve their reading and vocabulary through interactions with social media

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Inspiration

I'm fascinated by the intersection of artificial intelligence and learning, particularly literacy. There's a huge need to improve literacy both at the K-12 level and for the adults - there are over 35 million adults in the US who read below a 4th grade level. These adults are eager to improve their literacy and reading skills but don't have time to attend formal educational courses or the means to hire a personal tutor. What I'm inspired to create is an AI that can help the users learn to read by taking fun, informal content and turning it into learning opportunities - allowing users to learn and read anytime/anywhere using their smartphone.

What it does

A mobile app that lets users read and learn from social media content (news, Facebook feed, Twitter, Youtube videos, song lyrics). The app uses AI/NLP to enrich any content with reading aids, pronunciations, explanations and vocab quizzes.

How I built it

I build the app over this weekend using HTML/Javascript on the front-end and python/Java on the back end. The front-end relies on recently-available text-to-speech and speech recognition technology that is available as part of the (Chrome) web browser and can be incorporated into a hybrid mobile app. The back-end also relies on Stanford CoreNLP library, and various other linguistic resources.

Challenges I ran into

The speech recognition part (that helps the user practice reading out loud) is the trickiest aspect. Speech models are typically trained for "normal" fluent speech, and don't work as well with slow, error-prone speech or accents that a typical language learner would exhibit.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Previously founded and build instaGrok.com - an educational search engine.

What I learned

It's helpful to keep in mind the overall UI of the end-product & pitch rather than nitty-gritty technical details.

What's next for Everyday Reader Club

Releasing the (hybrid) mobile app. Curating better content (adding healthy living blogs, local news, etc) Beta-testing with users (e.g. at the adult literacy centers at SF/Berkeley public libraries).

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