Immersive Reader

Inspiration

We loved to read when we were younger, but we were sad to hear that reading comprehension scores among young children have dropped significantly. According to research:

Only 33% of 4th graders are at or above proficiency in reading
Over 50% of adults struggle to read a book written at a 6th-grade level
2nd and 3rd graders are now 30% behind compared to previous years

One-on-one tutoring works but is expensive and inaccessible to many families. AI-powered reading companions can help bridge this gap.

What it does

An interactive reading app where children can:

Read stories by scrolling through text at their own pace
Ask questions anytime — definitions, comprehension, clarification
Answer comprehension questions that are evaluated forgivingly

How we built it

We used DigitalOcean's Gradient AI Platform to host multiple agents for each task. To protect the children, we also used the Gradient AI Platform's guardrails to filter out content. This is all connected together with a React frontend.

Challenges we ran into

We also originally wanted to do video generation at key points in the story. We tested it last night and it worked, but deleted the instance to save our credits. It was very slow, but we knew we could expand to an instance with 8 GPUs. Then today, we tried launching an instance with 8 GPUs, but there were capacity issues. In the little time we had left, we tried switching to generating pictures, using Stable Diffusion but we didn't have time.

We also had issues with the chat feature because we thought that we couldn't maintain a proper conversation, but we realized we could provide the chat context in the request.