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Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books

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Re: Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books

#31

Post by klankbrouwerij »

Nice work! Interesting idea to combine an app with “real” books!

One of your challenges for your business model might be to ensure long-term engagement. Parents might be very interested in your product but might lose interest after a while, leading to high churn rate after a few months. How are you dealing with this? Any tips for other startups who are also selling to parents?

Your app reminds me of Google’s Read Along [0], which is also a reading tutor for young children which one of Google’s offline speech recognition systems (it seems they are currently using an RNN-T encoder-decoder architecture with wordpieces as the base unit). Too bad this app was not marketed properly and translated in many languages, a missed opportunity it seems!

Soapbox Labs [1] is providing a speech recognition API (also offline) for reading tutors and other apps. It might be cheaper to integrate their technology? I believe their ASR technology used to be based (or still is?) on the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit, that might ring a bell ;-)

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [1] https://www.soapboxlabs.com/

Re: Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books

#32

Post by ludicast »

Sounds like a great app, was hoping for something like this & immediately signed up

Initial onboarding flow comments

- nice product/market fit - I almost missed the promo code but wouldn't have been a barrier to paying

- imagine that at 25/mo (+ another 25 for books) it's also kind of expensive for families who are impoverished and might need it more (believe lockdowns were way way worse for their kids).

- felt like there weren't enough "none of your business" options. Like I have 2 kids of different age but similar reading levels. Even though they go to actual schools, I just selected that they were homeschooled to preserve some privacy

- wasn't clear how to handle siblings. I went with setting the options based on the one who needs it more and hopefully it doesn't get confused by both a girl's voice and a boy's voice (edit: after signing up I see the add-a-child option in the online profile)

- this should have been more clear: "Can Ello use audio recordings to provide additional features and to improve the service?". I selected no, even though I would have wanted my kid's voices saved to make the experience better for them. I just felt a single checkbox was insufficient here because there should be multiple levels of privacy+information implied (and where kids are involved that's way more sensitive an issue)

- annoying that after signing up there was no preview book available in the app, just a sad & lonely "hurry up and wait" page. would be great if there were immediately some books that they could read in case they already had them home or in the library (go with something popular here). otherwise it feels like a growth hack is being used on my kids

But looking forward. My kids really enjoy math+chess apps (esp the dragonbox family) and we usually work IRL to reinforce what the apps teach (also Epic and some others). Happy to share more thoughts, esp once they get to playing with it.

Re: Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books

#33

Post by tomsayer »

ludicast wrote: post #32

Sounds like a great app, was hoping for something like this & immediately signed up Initial onboarding flow comments - nice product/market fit - I almost missed the promo code but wouldn't have been a barrier to paying - imagine that at 25/mo (+ another 25 for books) it's also kind of expensive for families who are impoverished and might need it more (believe lockdowns were way way worse for their kids). - felt like…

Thanks for signing up but even more, thanks for the wonderful feedback.

- We actually find the opposite. Without the promo code people are reluctant to try it. I think because it's new and - to you next point - not cheap. - This is a real concern for us and one of our primary product develop tracks it to change this. Our mission contains the phrase 'regardless of resources' and as a $25 DTC product we are not doing that yet. Hopefully much more to come on this soon. - Interesting. We kinda have to know the grade level to send the right books. About 10% of parents know their child's reading level but 90% the only info we get is grade level and ahead/ behind etc... I haven't heard that as a privacy concern. We could do more to explain why we want this. - We can explain how to add siblings better up front. It is there, but it's small and easy to miss. - Agree. Right now as we are getting started we have made it binary - our main goal was that Ello would work for those who really wanted no data sharing, and to give parents that option very easily and clearly. As we start to build out more product features that rely on processing audio we should make privacy modular rather than binary. - Again agree. We're working on that. We definitely need to get parents/kids to the 'aha' moment sooner and not have a 5 day shipping delay. What do you mean by it feeling like a growth hack? It feels like the opposite to me - a growth killer!

Would love any more thoughts as you get the box and they start using it. Thanks you!

Re: Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books

#34

Post by eba7keb »

klankbrouwerij wrote: post #31

Nice work! Interesting idea to combine an app with “real” books! One of your challenges for your business model might be to ensure long-term engagement. Parents might be very interested in your product but might lose interest after a while, leading to high churn rate after a few months. How are you dealing with this? Any tips for other startups who are also selling to parents? Your app reminds me of Google’s Read Alo…

Thanks for the comment! We find that if a parent actually uses the product, and it changes their child's relationship with reading, Ello is quite sticky. Our biggest issues with churn are related to cost of the product and activation (people cancelling without ever using it). In terms of advice: 1) talk to parents about their pain points and iterate again and again, 2) be aware that a product that increases "work" rather than easing it, that causes a lot of resistance and friction.

We took a look at read along - it seems to have fallen off. I think the biggest issue with read along was the approach to supporting kids (it just gave the words rather than coaching the child through decoding them) and the quality of the "books" (the stories weren't that engaging and the illustrations were simple). The quality of the story matters a lot.

We looked at soapbox but for a number of reasons, we want to build our own speech recognition technology and have the team to do it! There are some issues with the time is takes for soapbox to run as well as the accuracy of the model. Thanks again!

Re: Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books

#35

Post by carapace »

danielscrubs wrote: post #28
carapace wrote: post #19

I don't want to rain on your parade. I really hope I'm wrong. But I see this as somehow profoundly, deeply dystopian. On the one hand, AI should be used to alleviate the economic and social conditions that prevent children from having attention and coaching from caring adults. On the other, raising children by robot seems sketchy to me (in ways that are difficult to articulate.) Like I said, I hope I'm wrong.

I think it's the opposite. I can't phantom that I would have learned programming at a young age if I didn't have a compiler telling me (with actionable steps, nowadays the search engine) that I'm wrong. Teaching is a frustrating job where you have to make students repeat things over and over which makes students ashamed and the teachers bored, it's not like the movies where the students remember everything perfectly…

s/phantom/fathom/ I assume your computer did that?

- - - -

I'd say computer programming is different than reading comprehension. Compiling is perfectly appropriate for a machine to give you feedback: the process is mechanical and the machine has good information.

> Teaching is a frustrating job...

Right: that's the problem to solve. (I'm assuming you're not talking about, er, having hired people to be teachers who don't actually want or enjoy the job, eh?)

> ...you have to make students repeat things over and over...

I would say that that's a obsolete method of teaching: in 2023 we know enough about memory now to teach mnemonics. But that's kind of a tangent.

> ...students ashamed and the teachers bored...

More symptoms of a broken system, IMO.

We have much better systems and techniques for education than we generally use now. (In my experience school (public school at least) functions more as a warehouse to keep kids out of the way, and any educational effects are secondary. That's the problem we should be trying to solve, with AI or anything else...)

My point is that computers and robots should do the scut work to free up the adults to do the important human activities like teaching our young.

Re: Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books

#36

Post by eba7keb »

novia wrote: post #29

Just yesterday I learned about the learning disorder called hyperlexia[1], where a child appears to be a very advanced reader for their age, but in reality they are approaching reading as a problem to be solved rather than as a source of information. The child ends up with a superficial reading skill that's more advanced than their verbal language understanding skill. I'd imagine a hyperlexic reader would sound very…

Thanks for your comment! As of right now, We aren't a tool that diagnoses or assesses in a formal way (though we may move in that direction in the future). Research shows that the number of children who read for pleasure is the lowest it has been in decades. Additionally, many children don't read at home at all, and resist parent (and school) bids to have them read at home independently. Ello's focus is more on making reading for fun a more supported experience where the kids have an opportunity to learn in the moment (using evidence-based strategies). We support comprehension through commentary Ello makes (summarizing and commenting as the child reads) rather than testing or assessing the child's comprehension skills. This was a purposeful choice. Hyperlexia isn't something that can be "created" through reading independently (Elizabeth here, child clinical psychologist and co-founder of Ello). It is a (relatively rare) disorder where very young children decode far above grade level. In most cases, this is flagged in schools, and would be flagged for us if a parent reported a very high reading ability for their child's age (which is usually the opposite profile of our customer). However, you are correct that hyperlexia is a learning difference where there is decoding without meaning. Generally, we send books for children that are at or below grade level in reading for practice with reading fluency. We aren't a full service curriculum (and have designed our program to focus on enjoyment and time in text).

Re: Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books

#37

Post by eba7keb »

xwowsersx wrote: post #23
tomsayer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup- It's a pretty settled debate now I think. There's a good podcast on it called 'Sold a story' that just came out. Thanks for the NYT link!

"Sold a Story" looks great, thanks for that. I will give the episodes a listen. Regarding Ello, how does it adapt to a child's reading level? Say my child is in 2nd grade, but is reading at a 1st grade level. Will Ello learn that over time and choose/recommend books that are more appropriate for their level? Appreciate any color you can provide on how that works. Thanks.

Right now we work closely with parents (checking in with them each month before the books ship out) to help guide them in making the decision around book choice. We also have a form parents can send to the teachers. In the future, we will have a tighter feedback loop to support this decision making that comes directly from the way the child interacts with the app (if we have the permission to analyze that data from the parent).

Re: Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books

#38

Post by eba7keb »

nimz wrote: post #25

Congratulations on the launching to real users. I know how challenging that is and especially when your users are kids, I can imagine the pressure is much higher. One piece of feedback on your use of the term AI. While adding the term "AI" to the description of /most/ products seems to increase their appeal, in products that are for children, to me, it reads like this product will be buggy at best and ends up decreas…

Great feedback! We will think about this and perhaps do some testing around this language with our audience.

Re: Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books

#39

Post by eba7keb »

danielscrubs wrote: post #26
tomsayer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are actually adding another language soon! (for somewhat random reasons) - we hope eventually to expand much more. And it really depends on how strict you want it - 'strict' is a bit subjective. What we cannot do yet, but want to, is put those controls in the hands of the caregiver.

I'd definitely subscribe if it can teach my kids the proper native accent (preferably posh British) because that's something I can't and it would really complement my own knowledge and that will really help my kids get a job in the future so it makes financial sense to subscribe. This would also widen the target audience, my kid is one year and kids that age are already starting to categorise sounds. Becoming a "poor…

Thanks! And thanks again for the feedback.

Re: Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books

#40

Post by eba7keb »

carapace wrote: post #35
danielscrubs wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the opposite. I can't phantom that I would have learned programming at a young age if I didn't have a compiler telling me (with actionable steps, nowadays the search engine) that I'm wrong. Teaching is a frustrating job where you have to make students repeat things over and over which makes students ashamed and the teachers bored, it's not like the movies where the students remember everything perfectly…

s/phantom/fathom/ I assume your computer did that? - - - - I'd say computer programming is different than reading comprehension. Compiling is perfectly appropriate for a machine to give you feedback: the process is mechanical and the machine has good information. > Teaching is a frustrating job... Right: that's the problem to solve. (I'm assuming you're not talking about, er, having hired people to be teachers who do…

Totally hear the concern. We have a few thoughts about this: 1). It's an AND not an OR for us. Ello doesn't replace parents at all. In fact, many parents use Ello WITH their kids and report that Ello has opened the doors to the kid reading more with them. 2). Not all parents have the skills to teach their child to read (or the literacy skills), there are also non-native English speakers who use our product and are grateful to have that support. 3). According to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a nationally representative assessment of student achievement in the United States, about 37% of fourth graders in the United States scored below the "proficient" level in reading in 2021. The scores are disproportionately lower for children of color and those with less resources. I would love for every child to have access to a 1:1 tutor (which runs about $100/hr), individualized education options and high quality education. But right now, we aren't supporting our kids.

It's also worth noting we aren't a full solution or a curriculum. So teaching in other ways still needs to take place. For many parents, it beats Disney plus and YouTube kids :)

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