Three parents – Reni Cao, Xiao Zhang and Susan Rosenthal – sometimes frightened about their children’s screen, so they left technical work to create a product that encourages children to get involved in the real world, while helping them learn a new language. Their movement paid off because the company recently collected $ 4.8 million.
The newly launched gadget is called Dex And it resembles technologically advanced glass with a camera lens on one side and a touch screen on the other. When children use a device for taking photos of objects, artificial intelligence uses image recognition technology to discover the object and translates the word into a chosen language. It also accommodates interactive history and game lessons.
While there are language learning applications, corresponding to Duolingo children, Dex claims that it requires a more engaging approach that emphasizes practical experience, allowing children to immerse themselves in the language.
“We try to teach an authentic language in a real world interactive,” said Cao Techcrunch. “Children not only listen or do what they have been said to, but rather think, create, interact, running and simply interesting things and acquire the necessary language related to these concepts and objects.”
DEX is intended for children aged 3 to eight years and currently supports Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. It also offers support for 34 dialects, including the Egyptian Arabic, Taiwanese Mandarin and Mexican Spanish.
In addition to recognizing objects, DEX accommodates a library of interactive stories that encourage children to actively participate in the narrative. As the history of the history develops, children are encouraged to reply, for example, welcoming the character in the language they learn.
The device accommodates a dedicated application for parents to see a detailed review of their child’s progress, including the vocabulary they learned, the stories they got involved with, and the variety of subsequent days in which they used Dex.
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In addition, DEX is currently developing a function that allows children to ask chatbot AI questions and engage in free conversations. This function is now available to some testers, but the company admits that it is not ready for a wider implementation. Parents can be careful in presenting AI chatbots to children.
During our dex testing, we had concerns about the possibility of learning the child in the fallacious words. Cao assured us that “rigid security hints” are included when a large language model is used in vision, reasoning and speech texts.
He said: “We have a always working security agent who evaluates conversations in real time and filters conversations with the list of words of safe stop. Agent suppresses the conversation, if any of the words of detention, including those related to sexuality, religion, politics, etc., parents will soon be able to add to personalized words of words.”
In addition, it was found that artificial intelligence is trained using vocabulary standards just like those that may be found in Britannica Kids and other children’s encyclopedias.
In our tests, AI successfully ignored nudity topics. However, he recognized and thoroughly translated the term “pistol”, something that parents should take into account when buying a device.
In response to our findings, Cao told us: “In terms of regulation, I’m not worried, but I think it is a problem, especially among among [some] Parents. “He added that these fears forced the company to introduce options in the settings to filter specific words, corresponding to pistols, cigarettes, vape pens, fireworks, marijuana and a bottle of beer.
DEX also has a zero data retention principle. Although this implies that there is no risk of sensitive or personal images, one drawback could also be that parents remain in the dark about the sort of content that their children can capture.
DEX is also actively working on obtaining COPPA certification, which might make it consistent with the Privacy Act for children.
The company provided financing with ClayVC, Embeddingvc, parables and Upccalex. Famous Angels’ investors are the founding father of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann, curatorial co-founder of Eduardo Vivas, Lillian Weng, who is a former security head at Opeli and Richard Wong (Ex-Coursra).
The device costs USD 250, which is steep for a product designed for children. However, Dex is positioned as a more cost-effective alternative to employing a teacher who can download as much as USD 80 per hour or attend school immersion, which might cost several hundred to hundreds of dollars.
Dex says that a whole lot of families have already bought a device.