Talking Stickers

95% of a human’s brain is developed by age 6, and child effectively build vocabulary from their parents. But parents living under poverty do not stimulate their children at home. The problem, Attollo is committed to solving is " how do we get enrich parent (or caregiver) -child interaction at home to close the vocabulary gap in low resource settings".

Every child loves to play with stickers! Attollo's Talking Stickers builds upon the magic of stickers to close the vocabulary gap. Talking Stickers are technology assisted audio-visual stickers that brings words to life for children and parents in any language or dialect. Talking Stickers is not dependent on internet connection. 

Talking Sticker’s Integrated Nutrition, Health and Education program for 112 million beneficiaries in India focus on improving the preschool education, last mile service delivery - home visits by Front Line Staff (FLW) and, targeting behavioral change in beneficiaries  

Research tells us that 150 million children fail to reach their full cognitive, social and emotional potential to be successful in school in India. Furthermore, children reared in poverty during early childhood show poor cognitive  outcomes and academic performance. These children are at high risk of antisocial and mental disorders.

India has about 1.4 million Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) or Aganwadi Centers run by the Government of India. These Aganwadi centers reach about 112 million beneficiaries caregivers and children below 0-6 years every day providing RMNCH, nutrition and preschool education to the beneficiaries. Most of the preschool children (40 million of them) are not primary school ready by age 6. India is investing in providing every Aganwadi centres with a smartphone in this fiscal year under their flagship program Poshan Abhyaan. This is a game-changer for Talking Stickers. Talking Stickers can be implemented in the 1.4 million Aganwadi centres at a low-cost reaching 112 million beneficiaries per year offering integrated RMNCH+Nutrition and preschool education. 

As mentioned earlier, our Integrated Nutrition, Health and Education program works closely with the Anganwadi centres of districts which work on the Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child, and Adolescent Health (RMNCH+A) strategy of the Indian Government. Majority of the Indian population live in such districts which offer a lot of scope for doing meaningful work.

Talking Stickers is focused on providing early literacy programs to 40 million children in these Aganwadi centers as well as making these children ready and successful in primary school. 

In addition, Talking Stickers will provide holistic integrated RMNCH, nutrition and preschool programs reaching 112 million beneficiaries of the Aganwadi centres, thus forming a common platform for health-nutrition-education. 

Our product, Talking Stickers, is the solution to address the problem stated above. As Talking, Reading and Singing are the easiest ways for the child to develop early literacy and social & emotional development, Talking Stickers work well as they provides a refreshing and rewarding experience for children. The Stickers promote parent-child interaction and enables cognitive brain development of the child.

Using Quick Response codes, our stickers should be scanned using our "Attollo" app which would then play/read out the pre-recorded content for the user. These stickers have colourful illustrations on them as well. What makes our product even more exciting for children is the recordable/re-recordable sticker which allow the user to record/re-record content and play them back to listen to their own voice. 

• Talking Stickers aims to build fundamental language skills such as vocabulary and oral comprehension (and not just basic decoding skills which otherwise represent the sole focus of much preprimary teaching in Low and Middle Income Countries (Bowne et al., in press [Reading Research Quarterly]). It has the potential to provide goal-setting, monitoring and direct feedback information in ways that reflect behavioral economics principles (cf. Mayer et al., 2015)
• Existing early learning interventions in low-resource settings rely mostly on the ability of teachers to implement the program in centers and less so on the ability of caregivers to interact with the children to improve their language and cognitive skills. Talking Stickers is a solution to empower caregivers and communities to be their child’s first teacher.
• Connect the child and caregiver at home in a simple way that is fun and easy to incorporate in daily routines. Ability to playback and record audio makes Talking Stickers accessible to all caregivers regardless of their literacy level.
• Connect communities to the homes to provide continuous and peer-based learning for the child. Audio content recorded by other households/peers allows caregiver to follow the child’s learnings (example a story book that is augmented with Talking Stickers, or phonetics and pronunciations). Caregivers can now playback content along with their child and re-record in their own voice that can also be accessible to other households in the communities. 

Talking Stickers is an immersive experience between the physical world and the digital worlds. Stickers are printed with a unique QR code that require our ollo app to bring words to life. 

The ollo app is not just a QR code scanner, the application has modules for content management, account management, and analytics modules. 

The application can also track the frequency, duration, type of content used, type of content not used, monitoring the attendance of Front line staff, attendance of children, geographical coordinates of where the application used. All data are declassified and then stored in the local devices. The monitoring dashboard works offline without any human data entry. 

There are many types of QR codes. Read QR codes are one-way pre-recorded audio playback and help the child in receptive language development.  Write QR codes help the child to record his or her voice, so as to engage in expressive language development. A hybrid QR code helps the child to listen in multiple language and record in his or her language at home with the help of their parents. Toggle QR codes help children to listen to other children in the communities on the same content. 

In the coming year, we are investing in Natural language processing and evaluation modules in the application to further help in choosing the right and appropriate content for the child based upon what the child has been exposed and evaluated. 

Talking Stickers as a platform works in any language or dialect, offline and augmenting any local content

Talking Stickers TALK, SING and READ in any language or dialect, without internet, augmenting any local content making it an intervention feasible to scale. Talking Stickers can be used by beneficiaries regardless of their literacy level, to help in understanding of primary health care, precautions, and self-monitoring all key aspects for behavioral change.

Evidence- based and proven learning outcomes

Research in multilingual community preschools in Toronto has shown that Talking Stickers provides a child friendly, enrichment in classroom experience, encourages peer-learning, teacher-child interaction and parent-child interaction and forming a powerful home-school-home connection for children

Scalability and low-cost solution

Talking Stickers uses stickers and flashcards with audio and visual aids. The stickers provide a cost-effective intervention at scale as compared to a supplementing with a program service model. The technology is a simple to be implemented in remote and less resourced settings.

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Full time staff: 12

Part-time: 3

Over the last year, we have partnered with Aga Khan Foundation and Pratham India. 

In india, we did our randomized control trial with Pratham India as our implementation partner on 1000 children, NYU was our evaluation partner, ASER  was our data collector. 

In Tajikistan, Aga Khan Foundation was our implementation and evaluation partner GABO region over the last year. 

We have currently having two business models. Similarities in both the business models is monthly subscription model. 

a) in the Government sector, the business model is based on subscription model per Aganwadi centers (and unlimited number of beneficiaries per Aganwadi centers). The key customer here is the Government. and the beneficiaries are caregivers and children attached to the Aganwadi center. In general, each Aganwadi center caters to approximately 80 to 100 beneficiaries according to WHO. 

b) in the Ollo Learning zones, the business model is based on subscription model per child. The paying customer is the parent and the users are the children. In dense urban settings in India, there are low resourced urban settings with migrated populations living in low and middle income. These will be the target for Ollo learning Zones. 

We believe in market driven approaches to fund our growth and operations. If Talking Stickers has the potential to be a market driven product solving the pain point of its customers, we hope to sustain through revenues generated from our sales. 

We however will require to raise investment capital to fuel our growth, and to get started we are dependent on grants to prove our business models work in the targeted communities. 

We hope to be sustainable in the next year and hope to be break-even by June 2020. We hope to be "series A" ready by September 2020. 

We are looking for incubation at MIT Solve to get the best brains to be part of the journey and refine our road map. We would like to be networked with sector influencers if we are selected. 

Specifically, we would like to have technology expertise,board members, business model, pricing , go to market refinements from MIT Solve. 

We also require assistance in how to build a company with the right people? how to retain talent? how do you attract talent? 

Finally, we would like to build on the networks for prospective investors or institutional investors for our Series A round in a year.

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Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, Glaxo Smithline, and Abbott Pharma are potential organizations who we believe will benefit in the FCMG/pharma applications of Talking Stickers. 

Talking Stickers using ML based NLP to predict the next set of vocabulary the child requires based upom the words the child is exposed. Can we able to automatically be able to learn the local dialect or language such that when the next set of words are ready and can the Talking Stickers application record the audio in that language automatically (machine learning the local language and then recording in the local language based on the scripts (texts))?

Talking Stickers using ML for image recognition and playback of audio

Can we have an image recognition (offline) to play back audio (pre-recorded) from our database without the requirement of a QR code from a printed illustration, i.e. find the closest illustration matching in our database associated with the audio, find out the next optimal predicted audio to playback for the child based upon the picture, the language and location. Can we use Talking Stickers, to be able to recognize any printed illustration and the child is able to hear the audio (that closely) matches the illustration in the local language, community location, and appropriate for the child’s age and predicting the next set of words the child needs to be ex

Talking Stickers over the next 5 years will reach to 112 million beneficiaries, a majority of them women and girls. Talking Stickers not only empowers the women and children but have shown to help in female literacy and behavioral change. Women in rural societies are under the influence of their men and do not have access proper education. Talking Stickers will help these women RMNCH + A, nutrition counseling without depending on others. We will further be able to provide more than half of the 40 million children as girls attending preschool education attached to Aganwadi centers. This wil be a game-changer as we provide the Talking Stickers solution at the exact interface of RMNCH + Nutrition + preschool education for women and girls to be empowered. 

Attollo believes to utilize the power of data to provide operating effectiveness in providing a solution that has not been solved even after several programs & services. 

Data mining using advanced artificial intelligence algorithms will provide a new way to choose the right level and appropriate content for every child with Talking Stickers. 

The problem in education is that we follow 20th century way of getting children ready for the 21th century. We bring personalized learning through advanced machine learning that can impact 112 million children specifically requiring a technology enabled solution like Talking Stickers.