tomsayer

6 ms·

1.
by tomsayer 2mo ago
-> You could create a mountain of educational material, apps, and tools with LLM assistance and verify it. Same result. I very strongly disagree with this. Teaching is not the same as a bunch of educational material and apps. The use of
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by tomsayer 2mo ago
I'm Tom, cofounder of Ello. -> I think teaching a child to trust an LLM from a formative age is horrifically irresponsible. I largely agree, although with some nuance. One of the most important skills a young child today is going to
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by tomsayer 2mo ago
Hey there, I'm Tom - cofounder of Ello. On the first Q: that popup is for the website. We're a consumer company and use paid marketing to reach parents. There are no advertisements in the product, nor is any data in the product
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by tomsayer 4y ago
yeah, had that feedback from a few people. Need to change that! Thanks for the feedback
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by tomsayer 4y ago
Thanks!
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by tomsayer 4y ago
Thanks for signing up but even more, thanks for the wonderful feedback. - We actually find the opposite. Without the promo code people are reluctant to try it. I think because it's new and - to you next point - not cheap. - This is a
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by tomsayer 4y ago
Yup- It's a pretty settled debate now I think. There's a good podcast on it called 'Sold a story' that just came out. Thanks for the NYT link!
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by tomsayer 4y ago
We are actually adding another language soon! (for somewhat random reasons) - we hope eventually to expand much more. And it really depends on how strict you want it - 'strict' is a bit subjective. What we cannot do yet, but want
9.
by tomsayer 4y ago
If you try it, I'd love your feedback. If youve been thinking about building this yourself I'm sure you'll have some great thoughts on what we've done well and what we could do better with.
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by tomsayer 4y ago
- Five is definitely insufficient for some children (and too much for kids who really struggle and want to perfect books). We're working on giving parents the ability to get more; either we ship more, or once you have read the physical
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by tomsayer 4y ago
Hi John :)
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by tomsayer 4y ago
Good feedback! Will work on updating the website to show that. Were you wanting to just see the specific interaction of how it works? You can see a bunch of videos users have uploaded here: https://www.reviews.io/company-re
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by tomsayer 4y ago
We still get some very confused people come to our site every now and then :)
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by tomsayer 4y ago
Right now it will likely work well. It is trained on a largely US based data set and so accents within that data set will do better, but the way the model works I wouldn't expect many challenges with Australian. Interestingly, as we d
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by tomsayer 4y ago
Great questions! - When a child makes a mistake or needs help we take the child through a phonics decoding exercise (scaffolded 'sounding it out'.) Right now we support reading practice rather than provide full systematic instruc
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Show HN: Ello (YC W20) – AI-reading tutor for kids that works with real books
41 points by tomsayer 4y ago|45 comments
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by tomsayer 7y ago
We do lots of things, but one of the most important steps is an in-depth role-play where we go through numerous scenarios. We're not just looking for the knowledge (which given their qualifications and experience they should have) but
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by tomsayer 7y ago
This is helpful feedback. Thank you. We had the counter feedback off a free call making the service seem low value. Ideally we get the best of both worlds. Easier said than done of course!
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by tomsayer 7y ago
This is a harder Q! I don't 100% know but two things give me hope. First, there are so many incredible experts in early childhood right now that - IMO - are undervalued. We have so many that want to have a home to use their skills in
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by tomsayer 7y ago
Didn't take it that way but thank you for saying that :) And agree! The organization Zero to Three does a great job advocating for this in the US but we're still way behind. It's not very long term, but kraamverzorgsters in t
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by tomsayer 7y ago
Thanks :)
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by tomsayer 7y ago
Thanks for the kind message! Trust takes time to build definitely - and honestly, we don't do it - we wish we could! The trust-building really starts to happen in the first call when each side gets to know each other (and beyond just
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by tomsayer 7y ago
Great questions! On the first, we're very cautious; we do not do diagnosis. What we do do is support parents in seeking out a diagnosis if that was the appropriate path. Our experts have all either done diagnosis or facilitated them in
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by tomsayer 7y ago
I think we're waayy to early for that but I hope we get to the stage where this is a question :) My first reaction is that our goal is to support parents and we'd want to be very careful before doing anything with their data. BUT
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by tomsayer 7y ago
We don't really think of ourselves as an app (although we use an app to facilitate the service right now.) It's direct, personal support that provides the value; the app is the access mechanism. We have plans to offer different a
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by tomsayer 7y ago
Thank you! Changed. I also see I said three ways in that FAQ and only have two. Would love for you to try us! We offer a full 30-day money back guarantee as we know this is something parents want to be confident in.
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by tomsayer 7y ago
(I'm Tom, Elizabeth's cofounder) - I agree with the societal reflection. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam really speaks to this so well. While one of the changes we think about is that, the more positive one is that we now know SO m
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by tomsayer 7y ago
This is really good feedback! I HOPE that most of the work we have to do is in communicating what we do rather than actually what we do. But without trust we've got nothing )given this is about a parents kids) and so it's a reall
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by tomsayer 7y ago
This is probably going to be unsatisfactory as it will be a bit vague but I'm going to try ... :) I think part of the challenge we're trying to help with is that lots of places (blogs, websites) say 'this is good for children
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by tomsayer 7y ago
:) We're new so these questions are great as they help us learn! Healthgrades is for finding a clinical service; we are not a health service. We often use the term coach (which isn't a perfect term but the best we have right now

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