Just days after replacing Voice Match with Assistant lock screen access, Google has now launched the Google Bolo App aimed to educate kids in India and also improve their reading skills in Hindi and English.
Bolo is powered by Google’s speech recognition and text-to-speech technology and features a built-in fun and helpful reading buddy, “Diya”. The app is designed for children in primary grade and helps kids read all by themselves by explaining and encouraging them to read aloud.
Children can choose from a large variety of engaging stories which have been extracted from Storyweaver and features up to 40 stories in English and 50 stories in Hindi. Children can also play interesting word games and earn in-app rewards and badges in order to get them to read on a daily basis. The app also works when the device is offline to make children stay focused and it’s also ad-free.
The app allows multiple children to use and tracks their activities and progress separately. The app will automatically increase the difficulty level of recommended stories which will be adjusted according to one’s reading skills over the course of time. Diya will also be able to explain the meaning of English texts in Hindi. Bolo is also designed with safety features so as to not collect any personal information about children using them.
Google has revealed that it first piloted as a beta program across 200 villages in Uttar Pradesh in the past few months. The result showed that 64% of children showed an improvement in reading proficiency in 3 months’ time.
Google Bolo is available on the Google Play Store in India and can be download on any Android smartphone running Android 4.4 Kit Kat or higher. The app is currently available for native Hindi speakers but will be available in other languages shortly.