Google continues to create and bring up tools and platforms meant to support families around the world during these crazy times. Now, the tech giant has introduced a new Android app for children 5+ years old that assists them in reading by giving audio and visual feedback as they read stories out loud.

Dubbed Read Along By Google, the app uses Google’s speech recognition tech to help kids develop literacy skills. This is through an in-app reading voice assistant named Diya. So as the kids read the passages out loud, Diya uses Google’s text-to-speech and speech recognition technology to identify any struggles the child could be going through. This then gets Diya to detect any errors and eventually read all through the passage successfully.

She (Diya) will give both positive and reinforcing feedback during the session, just as a parent or teacher would. Besides, Diya can also be used to help with pronunciations of some words too complex for the kids.

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On the app, parents can go ahead and create various profiles for multiple readers. The student can then just tap on their photo to learn at their own pace and track their individual progress. Other than just stories, there are also games that are also used as lessons.

Luckily, Google has restrained form flooding this app with ads or in-app purchase. To help parents even further, Read Along also works offline without the need for data or Wi-Fi. This, according to Google, is meant to help with worries about unsupervised access to the internet. The app is currently available in 180 countries and in English, Portuguese and Hindi languages.

This tool comes shortly after Google also gave out more resources for more mature students who wish to add on to their skill baskets. This was through an e-learning platform on YouTube where educators can create videos on anything that people would wish to learn.