Texie Personal Reader

According to UNESCO, approximately 250 million children globally lack basic literacy skills. Furthermore, over 700 million youth and adults can’t read. Studies also suggest that children of lower socioeconomic status are even more vulnerable to falling behind in basic reading and other academic skills. These populations are held back from higher education and training that typically lead to better job opportunities, increased earning potential and higher quality of life. Schools offer early intervention programs to help students bridge this learning gap as early as possible, to address this problem. However, these methods often rely on face to face interactions between students and teachers for individualized coaching, which is both time consuming and labor intensive. Fortunately, we now have access to intelligent mobile technologies that can be applied to education, allowing us to augment the classroom experience by providing individualized reading instruction that can teach students to read independently at any level, and practice without requiring assistance from an adult.            

Our solution is an intelligent, offline, mobile app that is accessible and affordable to all.

Functionally, it uses a speech synthesizer and visual cues to highlight words as they are spoken on screen, allowing readers to follow along at a comfortable pace. Advanced learners may scan or enter up to ten pages of content, which they can listen to repeatedly at their convenience to improve recall, which assists in retaining key facts. Furthermore, in order to support learners from various regions, text recognition is currently available in seven languages, and the speech synthesizer can speak over twenty languages. We believe that it’s important for learners to be able to personalize and customize reading content. It has been suggested that early readers tend to be more engaged if they are able to select a variety of reading material that are better aligned with their interests and reading levels.

With this goal in mind, we implemented an on-device scanning feature allowing students to quickly and easily digitize or insert any printed text, including their own notes. We leverage a powerful, on-device computer vision framework for remarkable speed and accuracy in digitizing printed text.

Our solution is designed to serve children, youth, and adults around the world whose basic reading skills lag behind their peers. Our second use case of facilitating content knowledge retention is targeted towards students who have fallen behind, or for learners at any level who seek to advance and gain knowledge at a faster pace. In either case, students are given the opportunity to learn independently at a pace that’s comfortable for them, without the embarrassment or judgement from others. As they gain confidence in their learning abilities, it is our hope that these students will become more engaged and invested in their own education, leading to higher achievement scores, and thus enabling them to qualify for higher education and training, resulting in higher paying jobs.

We have a working solution that has been made available to the public in several countries via the App Store. Our founder is also experienced in designing, building, and publishing software, and has focused on developing for the mobile platform over the last seven years. She is also a parent who has used educational apps built by herself and others, to help her children learn more effectively. 

We continue to improve our product based on user comments and suggestions, and have so far published twelve updates to the App Store. These updates contained bug fixes, interface changes, and new capabilities to better serve the needs of our users.

By applying, we hope to receive feedback on the product’s potential in the education setting, and for help in refining the product. We are also hoping to receive product marketing coaching and guidance, along with strategies to grow and scale this offering. 

We use on-device computer vision capabilities to digitize text in multiple languages, offering an accessible and completely offline experience for the education sector. This approach makes our product fully functional even in areas where network services are not available.  Our solution also features a unique interface providing a variety of useful functions, and we have some novel new features in mind for the next phase of the project

Over the next year, we hope to reach twenty new struggling readers who are committed to trying our method to learn basic reading. This will allow us to work closely with them and determine any difficulties they might face, so we can make improvements based on their feedback.

If our method is successful, we want to reach schools and make our product available to more countries in the next five years. 

For a more equitable distribution, we are offering the current version of our product for free in all the countries it is available in.

Since our current user base is small, we don't have any formal methods for measuring progress towards our goals. We have relied on communication from users to determine what's working and which areas could use improvement. We also look at App Store analytics to gather data about downloads and where this app is being used.

Ideally, we believe our product is aligned with the following indicators from the UN Sustainable Development Goals:

• Goal 4 - Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
• Goal 10 - Reduce inequality within and among countries

Our goal is to bridge gaps in basic reading skills, and to boost learning and retention rates for youth and adults within communities across the globe. We chose mobile phones and tablets as our platform in an effort to reach as many people as possible, including communities that don’t have reliable network connection services. Using computer vision and speech libraries locally on this platform, we hope to provide services that build upon the classroom experience, helping students catch up, learn faster, independently, and more effectively. As we receive feedback from our users, we can further refine existing features, and design new functions based on their needs.

There are many benefits of independent learning. Among other things, it promotes increased motivation and self confidence, leading to improved well being and achievement. Improved academic performance is in turn, linked to better outcomes in attaining higher education and training, which may qualify people for better paying jobs. 

Our vision is for everyone, anywhere, to have the opportunity to become literate and be successfully educated, giving them a chance to attain a better quality of life, and good health

Our solution is a mobile app integrating iOS UI frameworks and libraries, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing(NLP), speech library and more.

Our founder has lived in countries across three different continents, and has an appreciation for differences in race, language, and culture exhibited by people living in these regions. She has some insight into the needs of people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, and has experienced the positive influences and benefits that each group offers, to balance and benefit society as a whole. Building upon these experiences, we have an inclusive mindset, and strive to equitably serve the needs of the global population.

In the initial phase of our product, we have integrated language recognition and speech synthesis for multiple languages, to serve the needs of non-English speakers. In order reach and provide access to more people in need, we have also released the product to several countries outside the U.S. in our first phase of open beta testing and product discovery. We have currently localized the app to one other language, and we hope to expand this capability to more languages in the near future.

Overall, we believe that basic literacy is a fundamental right that should be accessible to everyone, regardless of race, socioeconomic background, or region. Therefore, the current version of this app is available for free in several countries, and we hope to expand this free offering to even more countries in the near future. 

Our company is focused on designing and building mobile app solutions that are innovative, creative, and bring value to users around the globe. Texie is an intelligent app that is designed to help struggling children, youth, and adults around the world effectively learn basic reading skills in a personalized and engaging manner. This app is distributed in the USA and other countries via the Apple App Store. In order to provide an a more equitable distribution, we are offering the current version of our product for free. We plan to monetize by offering new features in the next phase of this project, and sell them using nonconsumable and subscription based In-App Purchases.

Our plan for the next phase of the project is to monetize the app using nonconsumable and subscription based In-App Purchases for new features such as natural voices, multi-user account subscriptions, and other new functions we have in mind.

So far, we have not sought nor received any outside funds for this product.  Our founder has been doing all the work herself, so there has not been any additional cost to this project.