Google has today launched a new learning app for Kids, named ‘Read Along’. And as the name suggests, the app is meant to help young children improve their reading skills. The app is available for free on Play Store, and is open to children aged 5 and above. The app helps kids learn to read by giving verbal and visual feedback as they read stories out loud.
‘Read Along’ isn’t an entirely new app though. Google had launched the app under the name ‘Bolo’ (Hindi for ‘Speak’) in India last year. The company says it received ‘encouraging’ feedback from parents, and has hence decided to roll out the app globally.
The core of the app comes from Google’s advanced speech recognition engine, that identifies what a child is speaking out loud and suggests possible corrections. Children are assisted by a audio-visual assistant named ‘Diya’, which uses Google’s text-to-speech and speech recognition technology to detect if a student is struggling or successfully reading the passage.
Diya gives them positive and reinforcing feedback along the way, just as a parent or teacher would. Children can also tap Diya at any time for help pronouncing a word or a sentence.
The app comes with the ability to manage multiple readers within the same app. Parents can create multiple profiles for all of their kids, who can then tap on their photo to learn at their own pace. The app tracks their individual progress, and personalises the experience by recommending the right difficulty level of stories and games based on their reading level performance.
Since its an app to be used by fairly young children, Google is not serving any ads, nor is providing any in-app purchase options. Even the voice data is analyzed in real time on the device—so that it works offline—and is not sent to any Google servers. The app is completely free to install and use, and is available in 180 countries starting today. You can download the app from here.
