Ello is using AI to write hundreds of e-books to help kids learn to read

Ello, the AI-powered app that is designed to help young children learn to read, is expanding its library.

The company (which shouldn’t be confused with the defunct social media startup) plans to add an enormous catalog of e-books—more than 700 original titles, many of them created using AI—to its collection to boost its educational efforts. The books will be available through the Ello app, which leverages speech recognition technology to assist parents and teachers.

“Our mission is to teach any child to read . . . with the ultimate goal of building a foundation to support a child,” Tom Sayer, CEO of Ello, tells Fast Company. “We believe with shifts in AI, it can actually happen now.”

Ello uses AI speech recognition to listen as a child reads, breaking things down to a phonemic level and helping them improve their skill. Rather than asking them to passively touch the screen as some rival apps do, Ello requires that children read out loud—and offers help when they make mistakes or get stuck.

“Five-year-olds can’t type into a chat bar,” says CTO Catalin Voss. “The way they learn is by talking to [an onscreen character] that looks like an elephant.”

That elephant, Ello’s avatar assistant, acts as a one-on-one tutor, offering assistance and encouraging young readers with in-app rewards.

With the introduction of the new library, the Ello app will offer two tiers. The first tier will give kids a tailored reading curriculum on their tablet. If your young one can read “I am a cat,” they can go from there to the end of a third-grade level. Tier one carries a $9.99-per-month subscription fee (after a seven-day trial).

The second tier offers all of the above as well as the ability to add physical books to the program, further expanding the potential library to popular titles. Subscribers will also receive a monthly box with five curated books, activities, and prizes. That comes with a charge of $39.99 per month.

Building a library

The new 700-book catalog is a mixture of AI-created tomes as well as works written by human teachers and writers. The AI, Ello says, can create a book in less than 30 minutes—and after it’s approved, it goes into an image pipeline, where AI images are added to the story.

That approval process is key. Every book is reviewed by the company, which has reading specialists on staff and recruits teachers as advisers, before it gets anywhere near a child.

“We have humans in the loop to ensure the quality is maintained,” says Elizabeth Adams, Ello’s chief experience officer and a clinical psychologist who specializes in child development. “We wanted to be sure teachers [reviewed them] to say [the books] were appropriate and safe.”

In the year it spent building that library, Ello also improved the AI’s speech recognition levels and refreshed the product.

Ello’s speech model has been trained on more than 130,000 recordings of children speaking, says Voss. And it continues to learn from subscribers. (Parents have the option to opt out of that, but only 40% of users do so.) A data set as large as that allows the company to accommodate for things like regional accents, ethnicity, and speech or language pathology issues (such as a lisp).

To guard against bias, the company also regularly surveys parents about the app’s performance. For now, Ello only focuses on English-language learning, but founders say an international expansion is on the long-term road map.

While some might grumble that teaching a child to read is solely the purview of parents, Adams points out that the parent-as-teacher can sometimes make things unintentionally harder.

“Parents do not have an education degree,” she says. “Many feel completely helpless, where they’re saying ‘I’m supposed to teach my child to read?’ It can be a negative cycle with a parent, where the child is feeling embarrassed or ashamed.”

Ello, the cartoon elephant on screen never loses its temper and is infinitely patient, which encourages kids, she adds.

Does it work? There aren’t any scientific numbers to back that up, but parent surveys show 88% of children read more than before and 81% become more confident readers. And with more and more kids falling behind in school, those numbers aren’t just peanuts.

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