The newly launched app focuses to help primary grade students with their reading and intellectual skills. ‘Bolo’ is provided with work offline facility and has in-built reading buddy named ‘Diya’, who would encourage, help, explain, and correct the children as they read aloud.
Bolo to Enhance reading skills by offering distinct features
The app has catalogue of reading material comprising a bunch of 50 stories in Hindi and 40 stories in English which are completely free and the company is intended to add more stories in upcoming days. Furthermore, the app offers interesting word games and earn in-app reward and badges to boost children.
Along with this, Bolo provides tracking of the progress of children and most significant feature of the app is that it can work without internet connectivity and is ads free. Though the app currently is limited to two languages only, Google will expand it to more languages later. The app is free and is based on Google’s speech recognition and text-to-speech technology. It will be available on Google Play Store for all smartphones with Android 4.4 (Kit Kat) and higher.
Bolo to encourage love for reading
Google had been working on Bolo with over 900 children in 200 villages in Uttar Pradesh with assistance of ASER Centre which is a research and assessment unit of Pratham Education Foundation. ASER 2018 reports says that amongst all the students registered in grade 5 in rural India, only about half can confidently read a grade 2 level textbook. The lack of reading ability has most significant impact on further education. But with Bolo, 64 per cent of children displayed an enhancement in reading expertise in just three months.
Technology can be a powerful enabler in the field of education
Nitin Kashyap, Product Manager Google India, said, “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. We have been piloting Bolo in 200 villages, and the early results are very encouraging. We are now actively working with a number of non-profit partners to take it to more people across the country who could benefit from it.”
