Tech Ambition: Making Children Love the Sounds of Reading

Tina McIntyre readers to child at Tech Expo. Credit: Benjamin Rubin.

 

By Dakota O’Brien and Benjamin Rubin

 

Child’s Play Communications, a public relations company dedicated to promoting products created to improve the lives of children and their parents, held its third annual Kids and Family Tech Expo in midtown Manhattan on Thursday morning. The expo prides itself on being the only media event to feature exclusively tech products for kids and families.

This year, much of the excitement regarding the event was because of Child’s Play’s new StemStation, which features products dedicated to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. This was true despite the fact that a number of other companies managed to wow attendees with non-STEM products, one of them being an app called Novel Effect.

Novel Effect, a free app that presents sound effects with lines read aloud from children’s books, provides an exciting reading experience for children. Featuring more than 200 books, parents can choose what to read to their children and let the app play a curated list of sounds fitting in with the spoken words.

“We don’t want this to be the focus,” Tina McIntyre said, as she waved her phone around. “We want the books to be the focus.”

The aim of the company is to keep children engaged as their parents read to them, and, ideally, to make every parent and educator, a “master storyteller.” The app uses smart voice recognition to make the storyteller’s voice “stay in sync” with the sound effects chosen for the book, Novel Effect says on its website.

Each book has its own sound file, allowing for each book to have a unique audible spirit. Embedded are animal sounds, characters’ voices and good old fashioned music. Most of the sounds are created by composers out of the Seattle area.

McIntyre chose to demonstrate the product using the book Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton. “Twirl with the pig if you know how,” she read, as an “oink” echoed from the Bluetooth speaker connected to her phone. Seconds later, a banjo played a short melody.

The current focus of the company is to foster a love for reading in children. Hoping to have a deeper impact, the company commissioned a study conducted by Anne Cunningham, a professor of Learning Sciences and Human Development at U.C. Berkeley, to explore the potential academic benefits of the app.

The app is currently only available in the Apple app store, but Novel Effect hopes it will be available for androids next year. The Novel Effect also expects that by 2020 the app will be available for use by Amazon Alexa, and other smart home speakers, and will feature 300 more books.

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