Millions of American children are unable to read proficiently at their grade level, and education interruptions at the height of COVID-19 set many of them back even further. After watching her own daughter struggle with reading instruction during the pandemic distance-learning era, child psychologist Elizabeth Adams teamed up with two partners in 2020 to cofound Ello, with the aim of using artificial intelligence to make one-on-one reading tutorials easily available.
Ello uses generative AI to create books—more than 700 titles so far—that kids from kindergarten through third grade can access via a mobile or tablet app. The app uses speech-recognition AI to listen to and coach children as they read aloud. The startup says about 30,000 kids have read upwards of 600,000 books from its growing library, with larger-than-average shares of those readers coming from lower-income households or homes with non-English-speaking parents—households that would otherwise struggle to find or afford tutoring.