Dex Is An Ai-powered Camera Device That Helps Children Learn New Languages

Three parents—Reni Cao, Xiao Zhang, and Susan Rosenthal—were worried astir their children’s surface time, truthful they near their tech jobs to create a merchandise that encourages children to prosecute pinch nan existent world while besides helping them study a caller language. Their move has paid off, arsenic nan institution precocious raised $4.8 cardinal successful funding.

The recently launched gadget is called Dex and resembles a high-tech magnifying solid pinch a camera lens connected 1 broadside and a touchscreen connected nan other. When kids usage nan instrumentality to return pictures of objects, nan AI utilizes image nickname exertion to place nan entity and translates nan connection into nan selected language. It besides features interactive communicative lessons and games. 

While kid-focused connection learning apps for illustration Duolingo Kids exist, Dex argues that it takes a much engaging attack that emphasizes hands-on experiences, allowing children to immerse themselves successful nan language.

“We’re trying to thatch authentic connection successful nan existent world successful a measurement that’s interactive,” Cao told TechCrunch. “The kids are not only listening aliases doing what they are told to do, but rather, they are really thinking, creating, interacting, moving around, and conscionable being funny astir things, and get nan basal connection associated pinch those concepts and objects.”

Dex is designed for kids ages 3 to 8 years aged and presently supports Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. It besides offers support for 34 dialects, including Egyptian Arabic, Taiwanese Mandarin, and Mexican Spanish.

In summation to entity recognition, Dex features a room of interactive stories that promote children to actively participate successful nan narrative. As nan communicative unfolds, kids are prompted to respond, specified arsenic greeting characters successful nan connection they are learning.

The instrumentality comes pinch a dedicated app for parents to spot a elaborate overview of their child’s progress, including nan vocabulary words they’ve learned, nan stories they’ve engaged with, and nan number of consecutive days they’ve utilized Dex.

Image Credits:Dex

Additionally, Dex is presently processing a characteristic that allows kids to inquire an AI chatbot questions and prosecute successful free-form conversations. This characteristic is already disposable to immoderate testers, but nan institution admits it isn’t fresh for a wider rollout. Parents mightiness besides beryllium cautious astir introducing AI chatbots to their children.

During our testing of Dex, we had concerns astir nan anticipation of a kid learning inappropriate words. Cao assured america that “rigid information prompts” are included whenever nan ample connection exemplary is utilized crossed vision, reasoning, and text-to-speech.

He said, “We person an always-on information supplier that evaluates conversations successful real-time and filters conversations pinch a safe extremity connection list. The supplier will suppress speech if immoderate of nan extremity words are mentioned, including but not constricted to those related to sexuality, religion, politics, etc. Parents will soon beryllium capable to further adhd to personalized extremity connection lists.”

Plus, it said that nan AI is trained utilizing vocabulary standards akin to those recovered successful Britannica Kids and different children’s encyclopedias.

In our testing, nan AI successfully ignored topics related to nudity. However, it did admit and accurately construe nan word “gun,” thing parents should see erstwhile purchasing nan device.

In consequence to our findings, Cao told us, “Regulation-wise, I’m not worried, but I do deliberation this presents a concern, particularly among [some] parents.” He added that these concerns person pushed nan institution to soon present an action successful settings to select retired circumstantial words, specified arsenic guns, cigarettes, vape pens, fireworks, marijuana, and brew bottles.

Dex besides has a zero information retention policy. While this intends there’s nary consequence of delicate aliases individual images being stored, 1 downside could beryllium that parents are near successful nan acheronian astir nan type of contented their kids whitethorn beryllium capturing.

Dex is besides actively moving towards obtaining COPPA certification, which would make it compliant pinch nan Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

Dex founders Reni Cao (CEO), Xiao Zhang (CTO), and Susan Rosenthal (Head of Ops)Image Credits:Dex

The institution secured backing from ClayVC, EmbeddingVC, Parable, and UpscaleX. Notable angel investors see Pinterest laminitis Ben Silbermann, Curated co-founder Eduardo Vivas, Lillian Weng, who is nan erstwhile caput of information astatine OpenAI, and Richard Wong (ex-Coursera).

The instrumentality is priced astatine $250, which feels steep for a merchandise designed for children. However, Dex positions itself arsenic a much affordable replacement to hiring a tutor, which tin complaint up to $80 per hour, aliases attending a connection immersion school, which tin costs respective 100 to moreover thousands of dollars.

Dex says that hundreds of families person already purchased nan device.