Novel Effect: Read Aloud Books

Problem: There is a noticeable gap in learning readiness in kindergarteners based on socio-economic or native status that can be correlated to time spent reading aloud prior to entering the classroom.   

Solution: Novel Effect provides free to use, and completely ad free tool that increases focus and engagement for children and helps parents become "master storytellers"--even if they are reluctant readers themselves-- through a multi-modal experience that plays music and sound effects in response to the reader’s voice while a traditional print book is read aloud.

Positive Change:  With smartphone ownership growing rapidly around the globe (https://pewrsr.ch/2EHv8Q7), the free Novel Effect app uses the device as a whole tool, rather than a focus on the screen. This approach empowers parents to engage children in reading at a young age through high quality social interactions between children and caregivers.

According the the most recent Scholastic Kids and Family Reading Report there is a disparity between high and low-income families when it comes to reading. Lower-income families with children younger than five are less likely to have received information on the significant positive impact that reading aloud has on their young children.

This holds true with immigrant families as well, with a recent study by  Reuters that noted that immigrant parents are less likely to share a book aloud with their child than native parents (https://reut.rs/324kcG8).

Studies show reading to your child at a young age is the #1 indicator for future success in school, but books and reading together also enables meaningful parent-child communication, which also benefits the child's overall emotional well being. 

Novel Effect is exploring a Reading Challenge pilot program with a bakery chain in Los Angeles that has a large underprivileged Hispanic population.

The Hispanic population is the fastest growing segment of school population.  Many lag behind their peers in language development when they start preschool. 

The purpose of the pilot is to study the adoption rates and potential impact of our app in one community and, if successful, launch similar programs in other communities. 

Educators and parents are the users of our product. The primary target audience of the benefits of our end product are children. Our product is designed to engage an early childhood population in literacy experiences. 

Through piloting programs such as the bakery above we are not only helping families of underserved communities but also the educators, as their students will arrive at school ready for academic and social challenges.

Our partnership with the bakery is our key to understanding the needs of the Hispanic community that we want to target for this project. They have stressed this program would encourage their customers and community to read using this new and exciting free tool that is available to download on  handheld devices. We are working with them to add titles to our current library that are meaningful to their community and culture.

Our solution is our free app Novel Effect. Novel Effect uses interactive, voice technology to provide an immersive multi-sensory experience as you read books aloud. We have developed this product because we want to encourage adults to read aloud to children and children to engage with literacy.

Our award winning app, provides a high quality, caregiver/child interaction with a virtually screen free tool. The focus is on reading a real book to a child. Our app works side-by-side with hundreds of classic and popular children’s books to turn even beginning readers into master storytellers. Our patented ASR and NLU software keeps up with your voice as you read aloud from a print book and plays music, sound effects, and character voices custom-made for every story. The soundscapes sync in real-time, wherever you are in the book. You can skip pages, pause to talk about the illustrations, and read your favorite parts again—all without missing a beat! 

We are adding Spanish language books to our platform after requests from numerous educators and parents. We want to partner with the community to ensure that we are choosing books that families read to children that are culturally relevant. We're providing a motivating way to read books out loud. Our product also fosters an emerging ed tech tool for reluctant readers. It takes the spotlight of off them so they have an accompaniment to their readaloud performance and engages children in literacy in an entirely new way.

Voice recognition is the foundation of our technology.  However, unlike the current applications of call and response, Novel Effect takes voice recognition to the next level by fully integrating the voice-driven input with the audio output.  

You don't talk to our technology, you talk with it. At the core of the Novel Effect experience are soundscapes, made up of layered music and sound effects. Each is thoughtfully designed by professional composers and sound designers to celebrate the themes and integral elements of the story. These, combined with your voice and the book in your hand, create a multi-modal experience that brings the story to life. Simply read aloud as you normally would and the app adds magic to those special moments allowing the audience to become immersed in a multi-modal literacy exchange between caregiver and child. 

The soundscapes sync in real-time, wherever you are in the book. You can skip pages, pause to talk about the illustrations, and read your favorite parts again—all without missing a beat!  

The app itself is virtually screen free allowing the focus of storytime to remain on the caregiver/child interaction with the physical book as the connector!  

By expanding our platform to include other languages, we are opening the door to more parents reading to more children in more countries.

At the core of our technology is our Studio which is a web-based platform that creates unique voice reactive soundscapes. 

Our app, Novel Effect is currently available to the public on Android and iOS devices. 

Our patented Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) software runs directly on those devices to reduce latency and improve performance. 

We are also in the final stages of development on a cloud based system that will allow us host more readers of more books and paves the way for the application of our voice driven technology in ways to enhance, not replace, human interaction. 

Our preliminary pilot research shows that children are more engaged during readalouds while using Novel Effect’s immersive technology. We have seen the effects of our technology on native English language learners and we are seeking to explore its potential to enhance literacy experiences for native Spanish speaking children as well. As the immigrant population in the US continues to grow and require support, our app provides a solution because we give parents the tools they need to be comfortable reading aloud  and share in a literacy experience with their children in a motivating way that uses a handheld device as a tool rather than the focus. 

We serve educators and parents and we're seeking to transfer the above benefits to different populations of language learners.

We currently have around 100,000 downloads of the app.

By this time next year, our platform will exist within the app but also on the web, and we anticipate at least 20% of elementary school teachers (approximately 750,000) will use our technology, expanding our reach into the millions for English and Spanish-speaking populations with young children.

In five years, we intend to have our language models in place across all major languages allowing us to serve children, parents, and educators globally with a goal of 2 million users annually.

Our goals for Novel Effect: Read Along Books are:

1) To expand our technology beyond the app into a web-based platform, allowing us to better integrate into classrooms across the country.

2) To work smartly with partners that can help us meet school district standards for being a resource for educators (including the AASL who recently named us a Best App for Teaching & Learning).

3) To grow our user base of parents and educators and work hand-in-hand with them on product improvements to continue to meet their needs.

4) To increase the offerings in our library and grow content beyond picture books so the product can grow with our young customers.

5) To bring our technology to non-English speaking countries.

Language models for lesser known languages need to be purchased and/or built to work within our ASR / NLU systems.

Our current struggle in educating publishers and authors about the benefits of increasing their reach and audience with tools like Novel Effect that are being rapidly adopted within education settings

Gaps in consumer education for voice driven content is still substantial, particularly in making use of the app habitual in families and classrooms.

Language models for lesser known languages need to be purchased and/or built to work within our ASR / NLU systems:

• Begin implementation of spanish-language model to learn challenges of integration

• Conduct user testing to determine accuracy of models and troubleshooting

• Develop best practices for next language integrations

Our current struggle in educating publishers and authors about the benefits of increasing their reach and audience with tools like Novel Effect that are being rapidly adopted within education settings

• Creating an educator user advisory board / ambassador program to help us spread the word and passion for the product in the educator community

• Deputizing our Director of Education to keep focus on the app product, learning standards and educational benefits within the company

Gaps in consumer education for voice driven content is still substantial, particularly in making use of the app habitual in families and classrooms.

• Use our educator user advisory board / ambassador program to make the home-school connection

• Develop tools and communications within the app to encourage repeat usage, potentially include rewards programs such as badges and special unlock features

• Create content videos to help further educate the public in an engaging, non-market-y way.

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We currently have 17 full-time and 1 part-time employee. We also employ 20 contract composers on a rotating basis to assist in content creation.

We're a diverse and dedicated team of developers, musicians, educators, experts in publishing house business development, and others. Over half of co-founder and development team is female. Together, we've developed Novel Effect as an award-winning application in English with wide reach and promising impact on early literacy and learning. Our contract composers includes native Spanish speakers who develop our own unique medium of voice-driven soundscapes, using a platform designed in-house that correlate music and special effect to kid's books allowing users to brings stories to life and get excited about reading more. Our library of content is selected by families and experts to maximize the likelihood that it's found in homes, classrooms, and libraries everywhere, and that they're books that families and kids will recognize and love. Once a soundscape has been designed by the audio team it can be quickly implemented in Spanish through our software platform, allowing rapid scale of available content and increase reach to native Spanish speakers and ELL learners.

- University of California Berkeley research and development to further efficacy of product and understand its impact on literacy learning

- Slumberkins Publishing Company to add award winning social emotional learning (SEL) content to our library and promote SEL learning through the unique experience of audio content.

- Various classrooms in Texas, California, Missouri and other states to pilot our student soundscape project using our web based studio platform. 

- Poetry Education and Curriculum Publisher Pomelo Books to provide free poetry content for classroom readalouds in both Spanish and English

- American Printing House for the Blind for partnerships to promote our books for pre-braille readers with blindness and visual impairment

-Amazon Alexa to build Alexa skills that can be combined with our unique content and promote in-home storytime experiences

Our Value: We provide a way for people to interact with technology and each other at the same time. Our technology enables seamless voice-driven experiences for all kinds of voices, including those with accents and children. We provide a platform for enhanced storytelling, whether it be a simple soundscape or fully integrated animation. We deliver turnkey solutions to voice-first needs across content development, competitive strategy, and marketing. Our software solution also allows for the distribution of final products through a variety of external platforms including mobile, web, OTT, and streaming services.

Key Customers / Beneficiaries: Key Customers / Beneficiaries: Parents, Educators, Librarians, Education Technology Specialists, anyone who reads books aloud.  

Impact: We've logged over 100,000 downloads to date. Considering many are educators and librarians and parents that read to groups of children, we've reached even more children through classroom and library use of the app.

Our path to financial sustainability includes a combination of grants, SAAS, and raising investment capital.We work with publishers to bring our product to the market with paid and marketing-based partnerships. We create the audio content to be read along with their physical book products. We're also on the path to working with other IP holders in children's content to bring stories to life using our unique technology. 

We consider the following as the biggest barriers we face as a company:

1. Universal educator adoption of voice-driven tools has proven slow
2. Barriers to the habitual adoption of the Novel Effect app with families and classrooms
3. Development of compatible language models for lesser known languages takes time, research, and is expensive
4. Internal resources to grow product line quickly and efficiently

We believe that access to the MIT-Backed network of leaders in innovation and connections would benefit us enormously. We're uniquely focused to usher in a new era of bridging people and technology in meaningful ways. Being involved in SOLVE will allow us to share our product with an international community that we have not had access to before. We seek to understand what other companies are doing in the voice/education space and how we can fund our venture and scale it so we can create and distribute content that will bring families and people together in the face of increasing isolation from our everyday interactions with technology. We also hope to gain knowledge on ways to responsibly integrate our technology into the lives of children and their families. We would like to provide our unique experience in many morelanguages.

We also need access to innovative technologies that have done research and development on language models so that we can learn the challenges and successes in this area. The more resources we have in this area, the more communities we can reach.

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From a research and development perspective we're interested in the applications of our technology beyond our internal understandings of its potential.

We could conceivably work with anyone in the SOLVER community to add voice interactive technology to their presentations and their personal stories.

We see the value in starting discussions with SOLVER teams such as "Talking Points" to learn about the educational needs of English Language Learners and the home and school connections they've established that we can apply to our product. We're interested in the communities of the Indigenous Communities Fellowship to understand the opportunities to create rich audio documentaries and enhance the oral storytelling traditions of Native American communities. We also see an application of our product in serving students with disabilities and would find value in learning more about Livox. We could add value to Storyweaver's content as well.

With so many wonderful organizations in this space, the possibilities are limitless. We are open to partnerships and would solicit resources from any number of potential connections for future funding as well.

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We would love to be considered for the Innospark Ventures prize. It is widely known that handheld device use is at an all time high and it's an integral part of the way we learn, think, and behave. But, what are the effects of screentime on the developing brain and what are its ramifications for typical, vital steps in development such as self-regulation and social emotional learning and experiences? We've created a technology that allows you to interact with other people while you use it.We track standard app usage analytics regarding what users are tapping in the interface to improve user experience and content offerings. Additionally users are given the opportunity to opt-in to sharing their audio data, this informs our development team and allows us to improve the functionality of our voice recognition services. Audio data is for internal purposes and is not shared outside of the Novel Effect organization.