Google Bolo app for kids now available globally as ‘Read Along’

Google’s Read Along app helps kids learn by giving verbal and visual feedback as they read out stories.

Google Bolo first launched in India last year. It is available in nine languages including English and Hindi. (Google)

Google's 'Read Along' app which first launched in India as 'Bolo', is now available in over 180 countries and in nine languages. This app help kids learn as they read out stories by giving verbal and visual feedback.

Read Along uses Google's text-to-speech and speech recognition technology to listen and detect if a kid is reading out the sentence wrong. The app is also taught to give positive and encouraging feedback to offer the teacher-student or parent-kid learning experience. Read Along also has stars and badges that kids can collect as they progress through.

On the Read Along app, kids will interact with an in-app reading buddy called 'Diya' who will act as the communicator. Diya will appear on the app's screen throughout and kids tap on it to learn pronunciation of a certain word or sentence anytime. In addition to stories, there are games as well on Read Along.

This app also lets parents create multiple reading profiles and they can track each kid's reading progress by tapping on their photo. Read Along will also recommend stories based on the kid's reading progress. As they go up, the difficulty level of stories will increase too.

The app doesn't have any ads or in-app purchases, and even works offline. Stories can be downloaded on Wi-Fi or mobile data, and can be read later in offline mode. It doesn't require signing in either and Google says that voice data is analysed only in real time and not sent to any of its servers.