Dex is an AI-powered camera device that helps children learn new languages

Three dad and mom—Reni Cao, Xiao Zhang, and Susan Rosenthal—had been fearful about their youngsters’s display time, in order that they left their tech jobs to create a product that encourages youngsters to interact with the actual world whereas additionally serving to them be taught a brand new language. Their transfer has paid off, as the corporate just lately raised $4.8 million in funding.

The newly launched gadget is named Dex and resembles a high-tech magnifying glass with a digicam lens on one aspect and a touchscreen on the opposite. When youngsters use the gadget to take photos of objects, the AI makes use of picture recognition expertise to determine the article and interprets the phrase into the chosen language. It additionally options interactive story classes and video games. 

Whereas kid-focused language studying apps like Duolingo Youngsters exist, Dex argues that it takes a extra participating method that emphasizes hands-on experiences, permitting youngsters to immerse themselves within the language.

“We’re attempting to show genuine language in the actual world in a manner that’s interactive,” Cao informed Trendster. “The youngsters should not solely listening or doing what they’re informed to do, however fairly, they’re truly pondering, creating, interacting, operating round, and simply being interested by issues, and purchase the mandatory language related to these ideas and objects.”

Dex is designed for teenagers ages 3 to eight years outdated and at present helps Chinese language, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. It additionally gives help for 34 dialects, together with Egyptian Arabic, Taiwanese Mandarin, and Mexican Spanish.

Along with object recognition, Dex contains a library of interactive tales that encourage youngsters to actively take part within the narrative. Because the story unfolds, youngsters are prompted to reply, similar to greeting characters within the language they’re studying.

The gadget comes with a devoted app for folks to see an in depth overview of their baby’s progress, together with the vocabulary phrases they’ve discovered, the tales they’ve engaged with, and the variety of consecutive days they’ve used Dex.

Moreover, Dex is at present creating a function that enables youngsters to ask an AI chatbot questions and interact in free-form conversations. This function is already out there to some testers, however the firm admits it isn’t prepared for a wider rollout. Dad and mom may additionally be cautious about introducing AI chatbots to their youngsters.

Throughout our testing of Dex, we had considerations about the potential for a baby studying inappropriate phrases. Cao assured us that “inflexible security prompts” are included each time the big language mannequin is used throughout imaginative and prescient, reasoning, and text-to-speech.

He mentioned, “We have now an always-on security agent that evaluates conversations in real-time and filters conversations with a protected cease thesaurus. The agent will suppress dialog if any of the cease phrases are talked about, together with however not restricted to these associated to sexuality, faith, politics, and many others. Dad and mom will quickly be capable of additional add to customized cease phrase lists.”

Plus, it mentioned that the AI is educated utilizing vocabulary requirements just like these present in Britannica Youngsters and different youngsters’s encyclopedias.

In our testing, the AI efficiently ignored matters associated to nudity. Nevertheless, it did acknowledge and precisely translate the time period “gun,” one thing dad and mom ought to take into account when buying the gadget.

In response to our findings, Cao informed us, “Regulation-wise, I’m not fearful, however I do suppose this presents a priority, particularly amongst [some] dad and mom.” He added that these considerations have pushed the corporate to quickly introduce an possibility in settings to filter out particular phrases, similar to weapons, cigarettes, vape pens, fireworks, marijuana, and beer bottles.

Dex additionally has a zero information retention coverage. Whereas this implies there’s no danger of delicate or private pictures being saved, one draw back could possibly be that folks are left in the dead of night about the kind of content material their youngsters could also be capturing.

Dex can also be actively working in direction of acquiring COPPA certification, which might make it compliant with the Kids’s On-line Privateness Safety Act.

The corporate secured funding from ClayVC, EmbeddingVC, Parable, and UpscaleX. Notable angel buyers embody Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann, Curated co-founder Eduardo Vivas, Lillian Weng, who’s the previous head of security at OpenAI, and Richard Wong (ex-Coursera).

The gadget is priced at $250, which feels steep for a product designed for youngsters. Nevertheless, Dex positions itself as a extra inexpensive different to hiring a tutor, which might cost as much as $80 per hour, or attending a language immersion faculty, which might value a number of hundred to even hundreds of {dollars}.

Dex says that a whole lot of households have already bought the gadget.