Buddy.ai is one of the leading AI tutors for kids under 12, reaching over 20 million students annually from all over the world. Buddy is not just a chatbot. It’s an AI-powered talking cartoon character in a mobile app teaching English as a foreign language to students all over the world. How is it unique? It operates in a highly regulated environment where most off-the-shelf AIs like Chat GPT can’t be used.
The founders of Buddy.ai were inspired by their personal experiences of watching their children struggling to learn English after immigrating to new countries. Not only were online personal tutors expensive, but they were often not proficient speakers themselves.
Not surprising considering massive teacher shortages worldwide. In fact, UNESCO estimates that over 44 million teachers are needed globally. Operating from the belief that education is a right, not a privilege, the team at Buddy.ai sees AI tutoring as the only scalable solution.
But off-the-shelf AI models are trained on adult speech, which is why it’s not unusual to observe frustrated children unsuccessfully shouting at Alexa. Children’s vocal chords aren’t fully developed and they haven’t yet learned standard speech patterns or grammar.
This is what sets Buddy.ai apart. The product was developed from the ground up with proprietary technology designed specifically for children. Not only were Buddy’s speech recognition capabilities trained to understand the voices of children with many different accents, they also took into account variabilities in speech patterns, volumes, and even the presence of background noise.
Today, with over 11,000 hours of children’s speech in their dataset, Buddy outperforms Google and other off-the-shelf speech recognition systems.
It’s not just the back end of the technology that is impressive: this cool tool’s approach is uniquely effective because it combines multimodal avatar-based AI tutoring, proven to enhance learning, with game-based and story-driven education that keeps children engaged. Since it is possible that young children can lack intrinsic motivation to learn, play-based learning provides the most natural and effective way for them to develop new skills.
Currently, the company primarily focuses on making English language learning affordable for families in developing countries or immigrant families in English-speaking countries, but its vision for the future extends into further subjects. For example, a recently launched early learning course for English-speaking children in the US is growing quickly, and plans are underway to introduce a speech therapy course.
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Original Article Published at Edtech Digest
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