Many countries still under high-level contact restrictions including school closures, Google has launched Read along to assist with Education. The app gives kids an opportunity to learn through interactive play, games and rewards for completing tasks and progressing.
The app gives great feedback for kids learning to read offering both visual and audio feedback during reading. The engineering leads’ blog post outlines some of their design process and rationale behind the app design.
Read Along helps kids independently learn and build their reading skills with the help of an in-app reading buddy named Diya. As kids read out loud, Diya uses Google’s text-to-speech and speech recognition technology to detect if a student is struggling or successfully reading the passage. She 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.
With no adverts or in-app purchases required and the capacity to operate offline this makes it a very attractive app for parents. It offers some peace of mind as well since the input data from your child isn’t sent to Google’s servers.
Read Along is also easy to start and doesn’t require sign-in. 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.
With the information available so far, this is one of the few apps around I would happily leave my youngest using unsupervised. The offline option also makes it viable for long car trips and waits if you need to engage electronics to keep your kids calm.
What other education apps would you recommend to parents to help them keep their kid’s minds active?
