Inspiration

Covid has definitely made life a bit more challenging. With lockdown and remote learning, research has identified that the literacy rate is on the decline among grade school students, Supervised reading is an important part of developing this essential skill. However, busy parents often struggle to find the time to monitor, support, and guide their children with their academics.

What it does

Speakeasy Reader is a program that monitors a child’s reading abilities. The user can the reading material of choice, which displays the text from the selected work. They then click a button to activate the reading guide, which identifies texts and words that were pronounced incorrectly as the passage is read aloud. A vocabulary list of mispronounced and missed words is generated for use by the parent.

How we built it

A React App with the Web Speech API.

Challenges we ran into

It was our first time working with the web speech API. We spent a lot of time working on the logic to detect incorrectly read/pronounced words. We also struggled with working with react because it was our first time making an app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having a functional demo of a product that addresses a real need.

What's next for Hustletown- Speakeasy Reader

Moving forward, our goal is to improve on the display, user interface, develop a database with more book options, and highlight words in "real-time" so the user can make corrections as they read aloud.