Bookbot

Our vision is to help any child build reading confidence and improve literacy for tomorrow’s world. We understand that learning to read is one of the most significant stages of life and it is challenging for everyone. The World Literacy Foundation says that over half of all children truly struggle to read; either through learning difficulties or a lack of support from a competent adult.  As a result, today 1 in 5 adults globally still cannot read or write. Therefore, we can see that the scale of this problem is global. 

There is a direct correlation between literacy and poverty;

• Children who have a reading disability such as dyslexia and those with English as a second language are more likely to be illiterate;

• A vocabulary gap exists whereby disadvantaged children may hear up to 30 million fewer words than their more privileged counterparts.

We believe that learning to read should be universal and available to everyone, no matter where. Therefore, it is our goal to bridge learning gaps for the most underserved children and ensure all children can build confidence in reading. We believe that every child to have an opportunity to learn to read because we believe that literacy is fundamental, not only for our personal and social development but also for our ability to function effectively in society. Every child in the world should have the opportunity to develop their reading, writing and communication skills to create a happy and successful life.

We want to make reading fun and engaging for all, particularly for struggling readers and people with dyslexia. People with dyslexia often experience difficulties during schooling years, and later with employment. Dyslexia has been linked to school failure, depression, increased risk of suicide, delinquency and reoffending. Whilst dyslexia is a lifelong disability, with the right instruction, tools, technology and support almost all individuals with dyslexia can learn to read, enabling them to learn, grow and contribute to society.

Therefore, Bookbot exists for the children who need a little extra practice but don’t want to feel like a burden, or who feel a bit shy and want to practice alone. In addition, we exist for children so they can read with the need for an adult to be present with them. We want to facilitate children being able to learn to read with minimal resources. 

Especially in underserved communities, there are many factors that hinder a child’s ability to learn to read, including the absence of in-person classes, poor network connection, under-developed infrastructure, low reading interests, and poor literacy skills relate strongly to the solution that we present and are currently developing.

We want to remove these barriers for children, especially those who are underserved and disadvantaged. Hence, no matter the child’s situation, we want to equip them with the necessary literacy skills to succeed.

Bookbot is an app that uses speech recognition to help children learn how to read and improve their reading skills. The app’s real-time, on-device voice recognition technology listens to the child read out loud and provides feedback through pronunciation modelling. It also produces reports that allow teachers to monitor the progress and improvement of the child’s reading level.

Bookbot uses its own best practice ‘code’ to teach reading skills and provides one-on-one support as voice recognition ‘listens’ to the child practice, providing feedback and guidance as they go. It closes the vocabulary gap by creating an analytics model of what words the child knows and doesn’t know. Put simply, Bookbot uses the best teaching practice combined with innovative use of tech to provide a learn-to-read experience that has optimal impact.

Bookbot has hundreds of specially designed phonics books that accelerate reading skills. Utilising the power of OpenAI, Bookbot will add thousands of books that target a child’s specific interests and reading level. Therefore, this will enable personalised learning and individualised instruction for learners who have experienced disruptions in schooling and missed foundational milestones. 

When a child mispronounces a word, that word is spoken by Bookbot. Words are syllabilised, and each syllable is pronounced. Because children are learning to read, lessons and instructions are spoken through the animated Bookbot, instead of displaying written text. Bookbot uses a pleasing, natural voice synthesis with animation to make lessons and instruction fun. Each book has special words which are practiced at the start of the book. Books can be read by Bookbot to the child. As the book is read out loud, each word is highlighted and children read as they follow along. The child can rate the book which helps to personalise the library for them.

Bookbot was found to work with all children and uses a proven phonics approach that improved UK reading standards from 58% in 2012 to 81% in 2016. 

Despite the disadvantages and challenges that a child might face, they need to learn to read to succeed.

Research tells us that some approaches to teaching reading are better than others. Here’s what works:

• Evidence-based reading programs that are explicit and structured are the most effective: give the child a ‘code’ to read

• Reading comprehension skills – understanding what is read – are crucial and oral reading fluency contributes most significantly to comprehension

As such, Bookbot offers a unique, affordable and accessible solution (i.e. minimal internet connection required) that provides the closest thing to one-on-one teaching while enabling children to learn independently. Hence, children do not have to be in a formal setting to enhance their literacy skills. All that is required is a phone and minimal internet connection, as books in the Bookbot library can be accessed when the device is offline. As new content, it is added it is automatically downloaded when the device is online and the new book is selected. 

Bookbot is also able to provide educators and parents with the ability to monitor their students’ progress, which will support timely and manageable assessments to help under-resourced communities better plan, monitor, and evaluate learning. This is through a parent and teachers app which provides statistics on books read, reading time, reading fluency, reading accuracy and reading growth. These are collated into a report for the teacher which is useful for tracking improvements in reading and growth. The data collected can be leveraged for reports.

PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN

Some children need assistance with English beyond that provided at school. Many parents want to help their children do better, but don’t have the time to sit and read with their child, or they may not speak English themselves.  We’ve interviewed 56 teachers and they have universally indicated that they want to track students reading progress at home and at school.

ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE (ESL) STUDENTS

ESL is a term used for English learning that is done by those people whose primary language is not English. This group is a large potential market for Bookbot and they reside in both English-speaking countries and non-English countries (i.e. China, Japan etc). These people can use Bookbot at home to build their English speaking, reading and writing skills. 

INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION

The big opportunity for Bookbot is the indirect channel to the end-user, via large training organisations. English is spoken by only 20% of the world population. Of a total 7.5 billion people, 6 billion do not speak English.  Yet, English is the world’s most studied language. There is a huge market for English learning in places like China (the largest market today), Japan, ASEAN countries, Russia, Africa and South America, to name some. We see significant partnership opportunities to ‘‘master licence’’ Bookbot to these organisations either under the Bookbot brand or in the form of white labelling. 

DYSLEXIC STUDENTS

Bookbot was developed by our founder Adrian DeWitts as a self-learning tool for those with dyslexia. This condition occurs in over 10% of the world’s population. Those with dyslexia have difficulties reading, writing, and spelling, and they can fall behind their peers. Developing an English learning platform for dyslexia was a great breakthrough by Adrian DeWitt and we are very committed to serving this segment of the population.

Therefore, these children are currently underserved for reasons that are out of their control. In underserved communities, there are many factors that hinder a child’s ability to learn to read, including the absence of in-person classes, poor network connection, under-developed infrastructure, low reading interests, and poor literacy skills relate strongly to the solution that we present and are currently developing and a lack of a competent adult to help them practice reading or learning difficulties such as dyslexia. For example, dyslexia is a common learning disability that makes it challenging for people to process language, with about 1 in 10 people having dyslexia.

Therefore, Bookbot will meaningfully improve their lives, through our learn-to-read app. As a child reads aloud, the app follows along and highlights and helps with missed and mispronounced words.  We have augmented the eReader with accurate speech recognition and machine learning to learn how children learn.

Adrian, our CEO, has a son who is Dyslexic and he is the inspiration behind the app. When he was reading with him, he noticed that he was struggling to keep his place in a book or getting words wrong. In addition, he has 20+ years of experience in software development, coupled with his knowledge of phonetic-based reading/teaching approaches, which provide him with the unique skill required to create and continuously develop Bookbot’s AI-powered speech recognition technology as well as its specially designed phonics book.

Our team has three educators who act as Teaching consultants for Bookbot. Each of these teachers has vast experience in teaching young children and have a nuanced understanding of their needs and how they learn. They are tasked with the testing of our app with young children and relaying any feedback from both the teacher and student perspectives. In addition, our teaching consultants have experience teaching children with dyslexia. Therefore, they are in really close proximity to the children for which we created Bookbot. As such we are always receiving input feedback and ideas from both the teachers and children, which is important as we are currently in the product-market-fit stage. 

We also have a team of local experts in Indonesia, who work with Indonesia’s Ministry of Education and Culture. They provide us with feedback on how Bookbot should function with how teacher's teach.

Our focus for Q2 of this calendar year is product-market fit (PMF). We will receive product feedback from new cohorts of users and implement that feedback. We will be testing marketing channels and developing onboarding to get families and teachers to subscribe. Our goal is to have a positive ROAS that allows us to scale the product in Q3 of this calendar year.

We are looking for educators and champions to use Bookbot with their students and provide feedback on what gets in the way of using Bookbot and how we can make Bookbot serve them better.

We’d like to explore the possibility of how MIT could do an efficacy study on the Bookbot app, to have an independent and trusted organisation measure and analyse the level of literacy improvements with children. This is part of wanting to provide evidence that our solution works which will increase the credibility and reliability of Bookbot.

In addition, we want to get more people downloading our app and hope to expand the number of schools and organisations we partner with.

We believe Bookbot is novel. There are games and tools on the market to help people learn English, but none achieve the same results as the practice of reading out loud. Reading aloud is the method recommended by teachers. English is complex and learning is based on a systematic and explicit understanding of language structure and regular reading practice, that is where Bookbot is superior, since it enables that practice. 

This proven approach to English learning involves the student reading words out loud to develop not only word recognition skills, but also pronunciation skills, and contextual understanding. In fact, nothing beats a parent sitting with their children, listening to them read. This proven approach is simulated by Bookbot through the use of machine learning. Bookbot can be downloaded for use at home, and used by the teacher or tutor as part of the child’s homework curriculum.

Bookbot’s speech recognition is a first of its kind and a patent was lodged two years ago. It listens to the child speak as they attempt to recreate the correct sounds to match letters and identifies single speech sounds, which is critical in the very early stages of learning literacy skills. Bookbot introduces letters and sounds and utilises specialised speech recognition to listen to the child verbalise these sounds. It gives the child instant feedback they require to build their English skills. 

The speech recognition model that we leveraged in the Bookbot app is one of the lightest and fastest models that there is. The app is thus able to give immediate feedback to the reader in real-time as the reader pronounces word-per-word. Likewise, with the book-levelling system that we implemented in the Bookbot library, children would not only be able to learn at a pace that adapts to their current reading ability but also learn independently in a self-guided manner.

Aside from our personalized library, we are also utilizing the latest machine learning language model, namely the OpenAI GPT-3, to create even more personalized content that our readers would enjoy. By doing so, we are delivering content that specializes uniquely in the various likes and interests of Indonesian children.

1-year impact goal

1. The Bookbot English language app is available for English speaking countries including Australia, USA, Canada, UK, and New Zealand.

2.  Indonesia Bahasa is being finalized as a literacy product for their Indonesia Department of Education for public schools.

3. The Bookbot English language app for non-English countries such as Spanish speaking countries, Arabic speaking countries, China, Vietnam, Indonesia.  We sometimes refer to these as ESL markets, meaning English is a Second Language. 

4. Number of Lives Affected 1 Year Goal: 10,000 children

5-year impact goal

Our English version of the app is available now for worldwide use and that is a key focus for the next 12 months.  The porting to other languages is something we are keen to do and we hope our involvement with Octava/MIT Solve will help us achieve that. We would like to bring on board other languages, as we did for Indonesia, with a focus on the world's top 20-25 most populous languages. Our ultimate plan is to have a literacy solution for many countries offering a comprehensive library of books and speech recognition in their native language.

Number of Lives Affected 5 Year Goal: 5,000,000 children

For the English version of the Bookbot app, we know that the Total Addressable Market is 125M learners worldwide, and the realistic  Serviceable Attainable Market is 5M subscribers that would deliver revenues of USA $250-300M per annum. While over 29 million primary-aged Indonesian children are affected by these difficulties, it is undoubted that the scale of this problem is massive for Indonesia 

We already have a market-ready English version of the Bookbot app, and that app has helped various children with visual impairments and/or dyslexia in terms of their reading ability. The Bookbot app gave them the confidence to read and has made a difference in their respective learning journey. For instance, we can see our users progress in terms of their reading ability as they gradually move up the book-levelling system provided within the Bookbot library -- indicating that there are improvements in their reading fluency and accuracy.

Furthermore, there are various methods of gauging the progress that our app is making towards the impact goal that we plan to achieve. Aside from the number of app installations, we also measure the technical capability of our app. For instance, we are constantly making improvements in our speech recognition model, measured by its word error rate (WER). Likewise, the number of high-quality curated, levelling-based books are also ways that we track our progress. We have just recently hired curriculum specialists, authors, producers, and editors to ensure that the educational side of the app is constantly making progress. Other measures include Net Promoter Score (NPS) and achieving product-market fit.

Activities

Children download the application and find books that they like. Children can then have Bookbot read the books to them or they can read the books themselves and have Bookbot listen to them and provide feedback on their reading. As children read more books and improve their reading skills, Bookbot advances them to the next reading level which unlocks new books with more advanced content.

Outputs

Children can learn how words are pronounced correctly by having Bookbot read the books and words to them. Children read a set of books that have been suited to their reading ability and Bookbot provides feedback on their reading, including prompts to practice the words that were pronounced incorrectly. As children read more books and improve their reading skills, Bookbot advances them to the next reading level which unlocks new books with more advanced content.

Short Term Outcomes

The child would start to develop a habit of reading books by practising through the Bookbot app consistently and start reading even more books available in the Bookbot library. They would gradually move up the book-levelling system as their reading ability improves over time.

Long Term Outcomes

The child would be able to comfortably read any books or texts that may be relevant to their field of study and interests. This would allow them to excel as life-long learners with/without the guidance of a teacher. Essentially, they learn to read before they read to learn.

We have developed multiple approaches that power the Bookbot AI technology, including:

1. Bookbot is generating two Machine Learning models for the children's reading speech recognition - an acoustic and a language model. The acoustic model is trained from recordings of English speaking and Indonesian children in different regions with different accents. The audio includes a variety of readers - from readers that are fluent to new readers who speak with elongated syllables and gaps of silence. The language model is trained from the text in the library of books. We don't use a large lexicon to ensure the language model is as efficient and small as possible to work on lower-end devices. We have trained a model of 100 hours of speech and will have 1000 hours of audio recordings and transcripts of children reading books in the next few months.

2. Text to Speech (TTS) – Bookbot uses neural speech generation in different languages used for pronouncing words and syllables, reading books, and presenting lessons. The speech synthesizer runs live on-device, generating natural and friendly book readers, helping create a connection between readers and the robot characters they interact with.

3. OpenAI GPT-3 – We use the powerful text-generation service provided by OpenAI GPT-3 to aid us in the book-writing process. Using GPT-3, we are able to quickly prototype new stories from prompts, summarise Wikipedia articles for kids to easily read and learn from, and generate key points given an academic topic. This boosts our authors' creativity and is a great tool to write interesting and novel books.

4. Image Upscaler - We will deploy an on-device, offline image upscaler model that runs on the user's device. The upscaler takes in ultra-compressed, low-resolution Bookbot illustrations and generates high-resolution images on-the-fly. With this, we'll be able to release a low-end-mobile-friendly, significantly smaller app while maintaining visual quality. 

Here at Bookbot, we believe in the value of diversity. Diversity in thought, identity, culture and background, all of which contribute to a better, more inclusive workforce.

That's why we ensure that we maintain an inclusive working environment. Firstly, our team is comprised of an even split of males and females. In addition, we have a number of international staff in our team and we take extra measures to ensure they feel included. This includes creating a slack channel for communicating with our international team members which translates their messages. 

Bookbot’s business model is based on our freemium product, which is a mobile application that includes a library of hundreds of free books as well as a number of premium books. Our mobile application is available to customers on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play store so that both iOS and Android users can access our app. 

Users must be subscribed to access these premium books. But as our app is free, this allows us to minimise the barriers of entry for parents who want their child to practice their literacy skills and ensure that we can serve as many children as possible. 

Hence, it is a very inexpensive solution and an enjoyable avenue for children to learn with minimal resources. Simply, parents or children need a device and an initial internet connection to download the app and our library books. From there on, children will be able to freely enhance their literacy skills using our app without the need for anything else. 

In addition, our app is able to serve both children with reading difficulties as well as children whose first language is not english. 

Finally, paid subscriptions to our app are not our only source of income. We have also received a contract from INOVASI to build Bahasa Indonesia in our app. Once that has been completed, we hope to continue to build other languages into our mobile application.

• Our largest source of revenue to date has been the INOVASI contract. It represents $225k in revenues over a 12 month period starting in April 2021. We expect to generate a 10% net margin on the contract and we are in the process of securing an additional $100k from INOVASI with a similar margin.

• Once the Bahasa Indonesia app is market-ready, we expect to secure a contract directly or in partnership with MoEC. While we are at the early stages of discussions, there is an intention to distribute the Bahasa Indonesia app, in the first instance, through MoEC’s special education schools, which serve approximately 2.5m Indonesian students. If successful, we’d then expect to distribute the app more widely with Indonesia’s 29.4 million school-aged children. 

• We also expect that a proportion of schools and/or children in Indonesia will use the English version of the app and pay for it separately/independently. In the medium term, we are also planning to target children learning English as a second language (ESL) in other emerging countries, with a focus on the South East Asian region.

• The pricing for the English version of the app (only piloted with the Dyslexia market) is based on a monthly or yearly subscription model with an average price of US$5.00 p/month. The operating cost per user - excluding R&D, marketing and fixed costs - is marginal (~1 cent p/month) and will decrease further as the user base scales. 

Equity Investments:

We received an equity investment of $140k from Skalata Ventures, an Australia based pre-VC investor and accelerator programme.

Grants:

We have received a $50K grant from the Octava foundation.

We have applied for a $100k grant from the UNICEF Innovation Fund and have advanced to the second stage of the application process. If successful, we expect to receive the funding in 2H 2022.

Revenues

We are in the process of securing an additional $140k contract from INOVASI and expect to receive the funding in 1H 2022.