RELIK A-Z: OPEN YOUR MIND: THE ESSENTIALS

RELIK A-Z: Open Your Mind: The Essentials is a search engine to help increase knowledge, empathy and creativity through short form content. It helps you learn a little about a lot of things which can lead to surprising outcomes.

Although most of us are literate, 54% of adults 16-74 years old read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. This is shocking because it affects the livelihood of more than 130 million people and prevents them from getting better opportunities. This leads to inequities in generational wealth and an overall sense of not being able to contribute to society in a viable way. Although the unemployment rate is historically low, many people work more than one job and are living paycheck to paycheck. 

Solving the problem of illiteracy cannot be resolved in a day. It also can't be taught in a dogmatic, staid way as most often happens in academia. At the end of a busy day, most people are trying to find a way to unwind. Googling general information can lead to believing in disinformation because people are prone to get their information from social media sites and podcasts that often veer away from the truth.

RELIK A-Z: Open Your Mind: The Essentials takes an original approach to content because it employs AI assets and helps you learn general information in an entertaining and creative way.

While many people frequently use Google or Bing as their go-to sources for general information, they can often be led astray and succumb to believing in misinformation and disinformation. We also have the ascension of deepfakes and other malicious and misleading social media platforms because AI is both good and bad. Good because it will ultimately make our lives better and more efficient; and bad because it also gives rise to trickery and preys on the user's naïveté and worst instincts.

By using short-form content, RELIK A-Z aims to make the user’s engagement brief and impactful, whetting your appetite, encouraging you to want to learn more as you begin to clearly differentiate between fact and fiction.

RELIK A-Z consists of several components: text, music, videos, products, a podcast and a community forum.

I am consumed with learning AI, primarily as an artist starting in Dalle-2 when it became available to the public, and now using Imagine AI, Suno, Mubert and Runway. I am becoming quite adept at using Photoshop and have made use of Premier Pro and Adobe Audition. The podcast has a folksy underpinning and is, for now, 45 seconds using Podcastle. The goal is to go to 45 minutes and include guests.

Notion has been invaluable because it is a structured, accessible way to manage content that includes music and videos.

For the past couple of years, I've researched many words that specifically function with the themes of the project: increasing knowledge, empathy and creativity under the categories ANIMAL / PLANT / HUMAN / CREATURE / OTHERWORLDLY.

This is a curated search engine with an encyclopedic A-Z categorization and each letter has many subsequent definitions layered beneath it like a matryoshka doll ( Russian nesting doll).

Right now I'm actively building the letters A-E with a goal of having a first edition product ready to ship by the end of the year.

The EdTech aspect of my project means reaching out to schools and other places of higher learning.

Because the entertainment aspect of my project creates an incredibly large opportunity to work on short-term projects with celebrities of every ilk, this opens a floodgate of user potential.

Target Markets: Lifelong learners / Kidults / Students ( including adult education) Music lovers / Shoppers

Market Size (TAM)
SAAS = 165.9BN
EdTech = 106.46bn
              E-Commerce = 905bn
             Music Industry = 25.9bn

These target markets are underserved for numerous reasons. Socio-economics is one of them, but there are also people who want to be intellectually challenged. They want to have fun and are looking for something new.

Eschewing the old school ways of learning new things, some people are wittingly and unwittingly leaning into conspiracy theories and general untruths. This has led to a rise in literally going back in time: regressing to 1865 legislation, touting revisionist history both in and out of schools and LGBTQ discrimination are just a few of the issues for which we need to be sounding alarum bells.

There are several companies making curated, targeted search engines. The gold standard in general information is Bing and Google, both of which are powerful, but with great power comes great responsibility. Sometimes your initial mission can get away from you.

I'm beginning to understand that just because you Google information doesn't make you smart, or even rational. My mother even says, 'Oh, I just Googled it," and as intelligent as I believe she is, she can become susceptible to believing in a lot of nonsense.

Black and brown people are easy targets. I was on a commuter bus in New York with a group of Black professional women and they started talking about how they believe in the Illuminati and rich people kill babies to stay young. This is real, on the ground intel. People are losing it.

I understand this. I also understand that by stealthily embedding teaching with entertainment, you can change hearts and minds.

I picked this idea because I'm scared for the human race and wanted to find a way to use my skill sets to engage with the broader community and to become an active participant in what should be an aggressive campaign to heal our troubled nation.

My background is theatre (MFA, UCSD) so I always approach life with some degree of theatricality. It’s evident in the way that I dress, speak and present myself on a daily basis.

After working as a professional actor for about 10 years out of college, life got in the way and I switched gears to make sure everyone had their needs met (I’m married with no kids but I take care of two disabled people: My mom who is legally blind and my youngest brother who suffers from schizophrenia). Focusing on my family has taught me patience. Every day I learn what it means to truly sacrifice for someone else’s happiness and safety and I believe that I’m evolving into a more empathetic, compassionate person who wants to do better: for myself and now, with this project, for the general public.

When I stopped performing, I would come home at night after work and use my hands. I created a line of jewelry in ZBrush and made handmade masks and bags with painstaking craftsmanship during Covid. These pursuits were a balance of improvisation and precision.

Embracing AI was a natural progression.

People are calling for more responsible AI practices, more accountability and more effective regulation of the industry. I jumped on Dalle-2 with a thirst I didn’t know I had in me, staying up late and getting up early to get back on my computer. No sleep. And when I did sleep, I dreamt of prompts and images. If we can start making AI work as our companion as we explore new possibilities to enrich everyone, not just the few, the world will become a better place because we, as a collective, can reap its benefits as we all aspire to greatness. By taking a journey together one word at a time and taking a deep dive into the depths of one definition, the resounding tentacles of other words, other facts, other fictions start compounding. Learning becomes organic and starts to feel natural as you hunger for the next word.

I have always looked for tools to solve problems. I believe AI presents an opportunity to find solutions for the greater good of humanity. For some people, it is becoming more difficult to distinguish between truth and fiction, but I believe it’s not too late to put the toothpaste back into the tube. It will take a lot of digital literacy to get us there.

My mom and sister and some friends I made at Goldman Sachs OMBW, Black Women in Business have been an essential part of my journey to make some headway over the last year. I realized I was talking about the app, but not showing how it works. 

Looking at my progress thus far and with the help of AI, I've created numerous elements of the project that are now getting a favorable response.

I am longing to meet entrepreneurs from all around the world who are developing their own projects and looking for resolutions to problems; fighting for education to be equal and available to everyone. 

RELIK A-Z seeks a coalition of decency; of compassion; of the imagination; and asks the question: What kind of individual do you want to be in the world?

I want to be a person who can face a challenge and have a great community behind me. The rigor and commitment from the Solve team to take a deep dive into the weeds of extraordinary and driven founders projects is how we can excel and it's what we all want from those that give us support.

A lot can happen in nine months. As a solo founder, I'm missing basic things like structure (legal and otherwise), formatting the app, hiring a team and making optimal use of what I can do on my own. I need guidance. It seems as though it will come from many directions including a network of industry leaders from many sectors, curated support groups and leadership coaching.

Ordinary people need to be the heroes we need to save our democracy. I look forward to experiencing our differences and similarities. Our triumphs and failures. And our insistence to keep going; having the stamina and the moxie to do for others.

Although we may have different ancestors, various degrees of education and life experience, there is one essential thing that connects us: our humanness: our ability to be kind, forgiving, merciful, tolerant. 

RELIK A-Z approaches the problem of illiteracy counting on our basic instinct for goodness and decency.

As a consumer application, RELIK A-Z is designed to complement rather than replace human interaction. Learning something new as an institutional pursuit is the backbone to becoming a fully realized civil society.

The next step would be to see each other because when we commune, our shared experience helps us grow and encourages us to be more empathetic as we feed off of each other’s creative energy. This is an opportunity to find solutions to some of life's most pressing issues (for example, loneliness, addiction, poverty and developing new skills).

This makes live performance essential. Singing along with the music in a group of like-minded people feeds the soul. Turning learning into a musical event gets everyone excited about learning something new.

Live performances can create embedded memories that stay with you for years. 

AI is a jumping off place for a complex human experience, for it serves as a skeleton of the project, not the finished product.

The main goals RELIK A-Z wants to achieve are to help people get smarter, care for others and get inspired.

We accomplish these goals with the following tasks:

Text: Reading about a subject  (word in the app)

  Output: By understanding what the word means and reading supporting literature, your eyes and mind are flooded with the facts and/or fictional definition of a word and how it expands and dovetails into other words.

Music: Singing and grooving to words about a subject  (word in the app)

  Output: You can sing along with the music in a Guitar Hero styled game. Two people can remotely sing simultaneously in a duet. A single player can compete against their previous performances. Objectives might include subjectively rated creativity, adherence to a theme, and the ability to mimic and maintain the proper pitch.

Videos: Watching video shorts about a subject  (word in the app)

  Output: Watching a video allows you to relax into learning about a word without needing to do too much. It's a fun and effortless visual imprint of a subject.

Products: Playing a card game about a subject  (word in the app)

  Output: The RELIK A-Z Art Card Game has 10 cards in each suit, 5 suits in a deck (animal, plant, human, creature, otherworldly) for a total of 50 cards. Each suit has one rare and one extremely rare card totaling 10 cards: 5 rare cards in a deck, 5 extremely rare. Each card has a serial number designating the category and numerical order. Because this is an A-Z index with numerous words per letter, the decks are random. Card backs are visible to each player. Your hand is at play based on how many of each category and the number of rare cards in your hand. The right corner of each card indicates the points and rare and extremely rare have the highest point value. A virtual card game can have 2 to 4 players. The game can also be played as solitaire.

Gamification: Taking a brief test about a subject  (word in the app)

Output: A matching puzzle game like Candy Crush, using common gamification elements like badges, points, a leaderboard and progression bars. 

Podcast: Listening to someone speak about a subject (word in the app)

  Output: 43% of podcast listeners aged 35-54 had listened to a podcast episode in the last 30 days, making them the fastest-growing group of listeners.

Community: Joining a group or communing with others

  Output: Having a managed online community can increase engagement and help users get answers to problems and join groups, classes and activities.

The year 2023 was the warmest year since global records began in 1850. The 10 warmest years in the 174-year record have all occurred during the last decade (2014–2023).

In spite of this self-evident phenomenon, some people still don't believe in climate change. 

The Higher Education Sustainability Initiative addresses synergies between climate change and sustainable development. 

The Covid-19 pandemic kept everyone inside. Many children and young people took classes online or on Zoom. Even working adults were confined to their homes.

By creating a learning app that can appeal to both the young and the old and making it fun and engaging, RELIK A-Z can function as an additional learning tool. One that can be useful when natural disasters and crises hit and a tool to learn something new to supplement institutional education. 

Buying into disinformation and misinformation has a domino effect that extends way beyond not believing in climate change.

The world is becoming closed-minded. Banning books, rewriting history, rampant racial and LGBTQ discrimination, stifling a woman's right to bodily autonomy are just a few injustices we are faced with daily here in America. Conspiracy theorists and racists are ramping up all over the world.

These are strange days.

 There aren't many places left to go to find a sense of self. I believe my project, with the help of many, akin to the Wikipedia model but with skilled artisans, intellectuals and performers, can become a very powerful consumer application that can be there when the going gets tough.

According to an article in Forbes Technology Council in 2021, here's a list of must-have features in order to create a successful, user-friendly app:

How-To’ Screens / A User-Friendly, Responsive Interface / Chat Support/Callback Functions / A Search Option / Battery Preservation / An Intuitive UX And Clear Privacy Options / A Security-By-Design Approach /  Multifactor Authentication /  Scalable Text / Automatic Speech Recognition / Multi-Device Synchronization /  Targeted Push Notifications / Augmented Reality Integration / Data Collection Opt-Out / Data Caching

As a member of the AWS Jumpstart founders community, I have access to engineers who know the right tech stack to use for each application. My app has several elements which make the technology complex. 

RELIK A-Z takes learning something new and turns it into an event: Like going to see a movie, a concert, or hanging out with friends, only most times you're doing it on your phone or at your computer. By working in a repetitive cadence (read it, watch it, hear it, see it, sing it, touch it) RELIK A-Z aims to get under your skin.

The first shipment of the RELIK A-Z game will include a minimum of 130 licensed songs, 130 videos and numerous art collection cards with a game board.

Songs, videos and art collection cards are also available as downloadable content and will have a library that continually grows. Using subscription service as a way to access the app, many companies have a similar payment structure: for example, a limited number of free downloads, a standard, pro-plan or enterprise option.

With an ambitious goal of shipping the first edition to include the letters A-E by Christmas, we are driven to create a product that combines an encyclopedia with a Guitar-Hero style game.

RELIK A-Z is something that you can play, sing, touch and hold.

One. Me.

Approx. 2 1/2 years.

I am a black woman with a background in theatre (MFA/UCSD).

America is reaching a turning point. The soul of democracy rests in the power of diversity: People from all walks of life coming together to grow their minds. Their hearts. Their creative selves.

I was born in the sixties: a powerful period in our history as we struggled (and still struggle) for equality. The women's movement, the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement and voting rights all took place during that very important time in history. We are missing a positive feeling about what America is: what it can be. That needs to change.