[klankbrouwerij]

Nice work! Interesting idea to combine an app with “real” books!

One of your challenges for your business model might be to ensure long-term engagement. Parents might be very interested in your product but might lose interest after a while, leading to high churn rate after a few months. How are you dealing with this? Any tips for other startups who are also selling to parents?

Your app reminds me of Google’s Read Along [0], which is also a reading tutor for young children which one of Google’s offline speech recognition systems (it seems they are currently using an RNN-T encoder-decoder architecture with wordpieces as the base unit). Too bad this app was not marketed properly and translated in many languages, a missed opportunity it seems!

Soapbox Labs [1] is providing a speech recognition API (also offline) for reading tutors and other apps. It might be cheaper to integrate their technology? I believe their ASR technology used to be based (or still is?) on the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit, that might ring a bell ;-)

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [1] https://www.soapboxlabs.com/

[eba7keb]

Thanks for the comment! We find that if a parent actually uses the product, and it changes their child's relationship with reading, Ello is quite sticky. Our biggest issues with churn are related to cost of the product and activation (people cancelling without ever using it). In terms of advice: 1) talk to parents about their pain points and iterate again and again, 2) be aware that a product that increases "work" rather than easing it, that causes a lot of resistance and friction.

We took a look at read along - it seems to have fallen off. I think the biggest issue with read along was the approach to supporting kids (it just gave the words rather than coaching the child through decoding them) and the quality of the "books" (the stories weren't that engaging and the illustrations were simple). The quality of the story matters a lot.

We looked at soapbox but for a number of reasons, we want to build our own speech recognition technology and have the team to do it! There are some issues with the time is takes for soapbox to run as well as the accuracy of the model. Thanks again!