GenAI helps Worldreader build children’s reading skills

Exploring GenAI as a way to improve reader engagement

As an international nonprofit organisation with fewer than 100 staff members, Worldreader is always looking to work more efficiently so that it can focus on its mission: encouraging children around the world to read at least 25 books a year with understanding. Children who are more engaged and regular readers, it believes, are more likely to become better educated and more emotionally intelligent adults with a higher lifetime potential for earning.

Worldreader wanted to explore technologies that could help children learn and retain more from the digital books they read, and to make those books and related reading materials available in children’s native languages. After receiving grant funding from Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud service provider, Worldreader turned to AWS Premier Partner SoftwareOne for help.

The project launched with an ambitious question: Could Worldreader improve engagement and learning in a resource-efficient way by using advanced cloud services like artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and machine learning (ML)? Recognising that SoftwareOne had the expertise and experience to deliver such solutions, and supported in part with funding from both AWS and SoftwareOne, Worldreader set out to discover the answer.

Creating reader activities is a big job for a small team

SoftwareOne started with a focus on Worldreader’s BookSmart, a free app that children – and the adults who support their reading goals – can use on any device to read digital books, compete in reading challenges and participate in comprehension-building activities.

Worldreader wanted to see how technology could make it easier for the organisation to create and personalise those comprehension activities. “We have a very lean team,” says Sonny Lacey, Worldreader’s director of product. “We have a wealth of books and a wealth of ideas, but the creation of activities – meaningful activities that are specifically aligned with a book – that’s a labour-intensive effort. We had been thinking, ‘What are some ways we can leverage GenAI to be an extra hand in the factory here?’”

SoftwareOne invested in this project by providing professional services through its Impact program which focuses on creating positive impacts in sustainability and community engagement. SoftwareOne built a solution for Worldreader using machine learning and GenAI services that fosters a culture of continuous learning by creating new comprehension activities based on Worldreader’s existing collection of reading materials. Worldreader uses the solution to drop a digital book into an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. AWS Lambda compute service triggers code to generate content using Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus large language model (LLM), producing interactive exercises that can be personalized for a wide range of readers.

Using the Amazon Bedrock fully managed service for building and scaling GenAI applications, SoftwareOne created prompts on Claude 3 Opus. The approach established a way to provide the full text of any Worldreader book in local languages and then create rules for generating relevant and appropriate book-aligned activities to engage readers.

These rules helped to fine-tune how activities take into account variations in children’s socioeconomic status and which adults they are exploring reading activities with. This ensures that activities are appropriate for children from a wide range of backgrounds, whether they are reading with a parent or with some other responsible adult. The LLM can also analyse books in other languages like Swahili, enabling Worldreader to generate activities for a near-native speaker experience.

The solution allows Worldreader to take a digital book and complete a language translation that previously took days in less than one minute. This enables the creation of appropriate book-aligned activities in its application to provide a personalised experience for a wide range of readers.