ReadAlong: An AI Reading Coach That Listens

Learning to read needs someone to listen. Teachers still assess reading fluency by hand: one child, a stopwatch and a paper copy of the passage, marking every error. It takes hours, so it happens a few times a year. At home it's often harder still: in Sri Lanka only 22% of people over 15 are literate in English, so many rural children have no proper resources at home to learn. ReadAlong is a voice agent that listens to every child, every time they read. As the child reads aloud, AssemblyAI's Universal-3 Pro streaming model transcribes their speech verbatim (a custom prompt keeps the stumbles, false starts and wrong words that other systems "fix"), and ReadAlong aligns it to the passage word by word. Words light up green as they're read. If the child stalls, Pip the owl says the word gently so they can keep going. Afterwards Pip calls the child through the AssemblyAI Voice Agent API to talk about the story, and a JSON-Schema tool call records how well they understood it. Teachers and parents get what used to take a one-on-one session: words correct per minute against grade benchmarks, accuracy, every miscue, hesitations and self-corrections, comprehension, and a recording where clicking any word plays exactly how the child read it. A class dashboard sorts students by who needs help first, and the LLM Gateway writes running-record notes and coaching insights that are grounded in the actual missed words. Safety is designed in. ReadAlong never tells a child they're wrong unless it's confident: uncertain words go to the teacher with one-click audio replay. Nothing an LLM writes freely is ever said to a child. Next, ReadAlong grows into a full product: sign-up for schools and families, a PIN-locked grown-ups area, a phone line so children in homes without internet can read a story over a basic phone call, Sinhala and Tamil instructions, and an adult literacy mode with a respectful grown-up interface and everyday reading like job forms and medicine labels.