Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. However, literacy gaps directly affect the ability for people to access and use the information to their benefit. This problem worsens for children.

Lower literacy rates in early years have long term impact on how well children fare in the future. Additionally, children whose parents struggle with illiteracy are more likely to not get additional support at home.

This project is meant to offer every parent and teacher the means to supplement their children's education, regardless of socio-economic circumstances and ability to read.

We worked to use Google's resources and technology, like AI and voice-recognition, to build a project that could help enable anyone, specifically children, to develop reading skills.

We started to think about how our Voice and AI technologies could benefit children. We came up with the idea to create an AI-assisted app that uses speech recognition to help children to read. They literally teach themselves to read, using their voice.

That’s how Google’s Bolo (“Say” in Hindi) App was born.

Bolo is designed as a reading-tutor app that helps primary grade students to improve their reading -- anytime, anywhere. Bolo works without a data connection and uses on-device hardware to process language in Hindi and English. Additionally, this protects each child's privacy and safety as the data never leaves the device.

With Bolo, we aim to encourage and engage kids so their love for reading grows and it becomes a daily habit. We believe that technology can be a powerful enabler, and we want to ensure that students, parents, teachers and the education ecosystem, benefit from it.

We looked at issues in the Indian education space & how can we solve for it. This included the Indian education system with a focus on the barriers that exist, specifically tech intervention & how can it solve for the issue. Google voice API and AI made the most sense.

India has the cheapest data plans in the world which allows more families to have access to smartphones and the internet. However, we wanted to make the app work without a data connection and uses on-device hardware to process language in Hindi and English.

We partnered with NGOs that already work in this space to scale our approach. Storyweaver, Saajha, Room to Read and more.

We decided to target grade school children: 96.8% of kids (6-14) go to school but Only half of “Grade 5” children in India can read “Grade

Phase 1 - Pilot and Ethnographic Study

Phase 2 - Bolo Study in Tier 1 and Tier 2 Cities

Phase 3 - Launch Bolo Publicly - Our goal after successfully testing the app in a pilot with 1500 children was to launch Bolo publicly in India and showcase the positive impact it can drive on the community and for education in the country reinforcing Google’s commitment for India.

Piloted in 200 villages Unnao district in UP, India from October 2018 to January 2019 with the help from the ASER Center, covering 1500 children.

Among participants, 64% in the treatment group saw an increase in scores compared to 40% of those in the control group. 39% of the treatment group reached the highest level in the endline versus only 28% in the treatment group. 95% of respondents, both kids and parents from the pilot study would like to continue using the app while 92% of parents felt that the app impacted their child’s reading skills.

“Sneha school teacher also asked her ‘Where else are you practicing your reading from?’ - A mother

“I would definitely like this app to be given to everyone else in the village too.” - A father