Educational Language Development Robot

While technology has been evolving to meet the needs of a changing society, our educational practices are still based on early 20th-century philosophies. ROYBI is an AI-powered, educational companion robot, currently targeting 2-7-year-old children focusing on language learning. 

ROYBI provides a uniquely tailored teaching experience, utilizing its machine learning technology to deliver content based on kids' ability. ROYBI interacts with kids as well as their supervisors, including teachers, parents, and grandparents. 

As we prepare our children to become leaders in a future far different from our own, we at ROYBI feel that it's necessary to revise our current educational practices to meet their needs better. 

Our education system needs a fundamental change, and that change starts with early childhood education. ROYBI guides a child’s linguistic development beyond traditional pedagogies, facilitating collaboration between home and school contexts. ROYBI's cloud platform creates a shareable learner profile, enabling parents and teachers to come together through shared communication about each child's developing skills and needs.

Direct to consumers, millennials aged 25 -45 with HH income over $50K globally and kids aged 2 and above. ROYBI's consistent collection and analysis of data will allow for the evaluation of children's learning outcomes at both an individual and group scale. 

Gradually, ROYBI will expand its products to cover low-income families and children with special needs as we receive additional funding, enabling us to extend our technology further.

ROYBI’s technology will be used to:

 1) track the learning progress of a child by listening to their daily conversations, counting the words he/she uses throughout the day, and practicing with the child via short, daily lessons through the robot (patent application pending)  

2) provide language-related and age-specific interactive stories on its companion iOS and Android apps, using an internal display to help the child learn more vocabulary as well as through authentic, socially-contingent interactions with the robot 

3) teach children a second language (English 2019, Mandarin 2020, Spanish/Arabic 2020/2021)

4) facilitate children’s interactive daily conversations to help in speech development and increase hippocampal activity 

5) create an emotional bond through the robot’s emotion detection technology and touch sensors, encouraging social-emotional development

6) share monthly development reports to parents and teachers, building home-school partnerships based on children’s unique needs and progress 

ROYBI has the potential to be a particularly effective source of socio-emotional and academic support, potentially improving children’s educational skills, while decreasing the impact of daily stressors. In addition, the design components of ROYBI allow for minimal maintenance, as educational content and updates come from the cloud. 

What ROYBI does is different than social robots or chatbots already available on the market. We designed and developed a curriculum in-house to teach and practice with children. Our focus is not 'chatting,' but it is to teach children, assess their learning progress, create academic and scientific growth reports and assessments, correct pronunciations (coming a little later), and more. 

Ultimately, we use true AI to gradually adjust the content based on the child's learning capabilities and provide a vast ecosystem of educational activities.  Our platform guides parents and teachers with its automated / pre-developed content rather than just having conversations. 

ROYBI's platform is firmly grounded, not only in cognitive development but also in social-pragmatic, interactive principles of children's learning. ROYBI promotes active language learning beyond vocabulary and phrases toward developing meaningful, ecologically-valid communication skills. 

ROYBI continuously analyzes children's speech, including turn-taking, talkativeness, and vocabulary, getting to know each child's unique communicative behaviors and skills across languages.  As a result, ROYBI can grow individually with each child, sensitively tailoring its teaching to their specific needs over time. Furthermore, ROYBI can recognize faces and emotions and to laugh, cry, and entertain children in an authentic, interactive manner.

• High definition video camera to detect kid's face to initiate a conversation by recognizing them and grab their attention

• Voice recognition in English and Mandarin

• The curriculum in the English language already designed in-house

• Touch sensors for several actions performed by the robot

• Machine learning technology to gradually learn about every child's interest and learning ability 

• Small screen, full color, and high definition to show pictures, colors, words and animation

Through video monitoring and voice detection, ROYBI collects anonymous data to recognize children's speech patterns. To analyze children's language development, we will base our measures on standard data analysis techniques used in the developmental psycholinguistics literature. Children's language development will be tracked on an individual as well as a normed basis. Children's data will be stored so that their progress can be tracked over time. External comparisons will be based on age-matched norms from our linguistic source databases. 

Further, as we will be able to analyze each child's vocabulary and syntactic progress, we plan to contribute our research to academic institutions for language and child development (anonymous data. Our users' privacy is highly protected). Our goal is to increase general knowledge in the fields of education and developmental psychology about children's first- and second-language development through the use of our data (Data is securely stored on Amazon Web Services).

The ROYBI team is dedicated to developing innovative pedagogical practices through scientific research and digital ingenuity. A growing body of research continues to show robust benefits of children learning more than one language. ROYBI was developed in response to these research findings, based on principles that are developmentally responsive to children’s language learning needs. Our internal research and focus group results have shown that multilingualism and large vocabulary growth can increase creativity, improve retention of material through cross-linguistic transfer, facilitate social skills, and scaffold learning for children with learning disabilities.

So far we have been getting a lot of traction, already close to 1k subscribers who expressed interest in our pilots. We expect this number to grow to 10K in the next five months for early adopters and we plan to increase the user base to over 1 million in the next few years making it one of the largest communities in early childhood education.

• Beginning in July, we are planning to launch a very limited pilot distribution of approximately 50-100 units in each of the following countries: U.S., Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Jordan, Dubai, and in some Latin American countries. We expect to grow this within the next year.

• Through partnerships with global educational initiatives, we envision ROYBI to be in as many schools and homes as possible over the next five years. We plan to increase access to Roybi Robot and its platform to make personalized education more accessible to young children, parents, and families anywhere around the world.

• We need more funding to spend on research, manufacturing, and global expansion (an estimated additional $5M USD)

• Limited resources in engineering and language development

• Limited resources in customizing our voice engine 

• We need connections to schools and strategic partnerships to help us in education and technology categories

• Actively fundraising

• Hiring more engineers in AI and ML

• Hiring engineers in data science

• Bringing more experts onboard in language development and STEM activities in the future

• Applying for government or institutional grants

• Participating in competitions, presentations, and conferences to build partnerships

N/A

Full-time: 10

Part-time: 5

Advisors: 5

Mentors: 3

The Founder and CEO of ROYBI, Elnaz Sarraf, is a successful entrepreneur having co-founded iBaby, where she increased online sales by 400% and retail sales by 76% globally. iBaby is today valued at US$50m. Elnaz managed to place iBaby products in over 10K storefronts globally, made iBaby a Fortune 5000 company with only five staff in the US, and led iBaby to become the #2 most wanted brand in baby monitoring over 50 competitors. 

Ron Cheng, CTO, has over 15 years of experience with International NPI, Manufacturing, Engineering, Planning, QA, and General Management. Consistently exceeding external and internal customer expectation with a proven track record in customer-driven, activity-based and result-oriented business environment.

ROYBI’s team, including advisors, bring with them many years of experience at major corporations, including iBaby, Siemens, JDSU, Apple, Nest, Harvard, Duke University, NSF, Sensory, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Huawei, among others. Our team has a strong connection in education where they have been board members of some schools such as the German International School of Silicon Valley (GISSV).

• xEdu Accelerator, Finland for education and partnerships in EU and ME
• United Nations Technology and Innovation Labs
• UPenn School of Education - Semifinalist Business Plan Competition
• Partnered with Alibaba
• Amazon EdStart Accelerator 
• Promise Venture Studio 

Device: 
The device is currently priced at $249 with no additional fees for one year

Cloud Subscription (on-demand): 
 Estimated avg. spending $200/y/user 
1) 24/7/365 cloud storage and subscription
2) Software modules subscription avg. $10/m: We add different capabilities to the cloud for people to subscribe as needed basis. 

Content Subscription on App and Cloud (on-demand): 
1) Educational content created by third-party or licensing. 
2) Audio stories, games, and bedtime stories to interact with kids. 

ROYBI intends to finalize its latest design and chipset by July 2019, and start the first batch of 10 prototypes for testing, moving to an additional 100 samples and a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, with a minimum target of US$250k. During this period, ROYBI also intends to conduct follow-up meetings with Amazon, Apple, B8ta, Best Buy, Buy Buy Baby, Target and Walmart, with all of whom ROYBI’s executive team already has established contacts. 

In 2020, ROYBI expects to achieve revenues of over $2M, consisting of product sales to the aforementioned retailers as well as via ROYBI’s own website and cloud subscriptions. Also, ROYBI intends to work closely with strategic partners, including schools and other educational organizations, to drive revenues and product adoption globally. 

From 2021 to 2024, ROYBI expects to increase revenues by at least 10x with cloud subscriptions and content sales contributing substantially to revenues. Geographically, revenues are expected to be generated initially in North America until 2020 and subsequently to expand into and grow in the Far East, including China, Japan, and South Korea as well as in the Middle East and Europe. ROYBI will be in need of raising an additional $10M in the next two years for global expansion. 

We believe Solve can provide us with opportunities that on our own we will have difficulties to make. Your help will enable us to accelerate our business in many areas such as partnerships, research, data, education, and allowing us to get connected to experts who can help us have a much bigger impact. 

Corporations: Apple, Disney, Sesame Workshop, Google, Amazon Education, Microsoft, Walmart, Verizon, AT&T, Xiaomi, Baidu, Tencent, Johnson & Johnson, PBS, or similar companies that can help us in technology, education, sales channels, and operations. 

Research Partners: MIT, Stanford, Harvard, international institutions in Asia, EU, ME

Impact Investors: Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, Gates Foundation, UN, World Bank, or similar

Investors: Andreessen Horowitz, sequoia capital, Khosla Ventures, NEA, GV, or similar

Smaller companies in education, technology, sales, and operations especially to create content and skills for Roybi Robot as we expand into regions beyond the U.S.

• Use the fund to continue developing our AI and ML engine for young kids. We need to analyze huge amount of data which is not currently available. With the prize, we will be able to collect data anonymously that can be so valuable in research and machine learning to detect, and understand how children talk. These findings can help us later to empower children with speech delays, autism, or other disabilities that can be controlled and worked on at early ages.
• Being able to develop our AI engine further to carry on longer conversations with children.
• Being able to utilize AI in STEM content and activities.
• Apply AI to our content in Mandarin, Spanish, and understand the learning progress.
• Bring on board experts and engineers to help us analyze our database.

In many areas in the U.S. or globally girls and women are still not being offered equal opportunities in education, workforce, and throughout life. With additional funding, we would be able to target young girls and help them gain educational skills by creating specific content and products that focuses on their needs and progress.