Former Googlers seek to captivate kids with an AI-powered learning app

Summary

Big Tech companies and upcoming startups want to use generative AI to build software and hardware for kids. A lot of those experiences are limited to text or voice, and kids might not find that captivating. Three former Google employees want to get over that hurdle with their generative AI-powered interactive app, Sparkli. Sparkli was founded last year by Lax Poojary, Lucie Marchand, and Myn Kang. As parents, Poojary and Kang were not able to satisfy their children’s curiosity or give engaging answers to their questions. “Kids, by definition, are very curious, and my son would ask me questions about how cars work or how it rains. My approach was to use ChatGPT or Gemini to explain these concepts to a six-year-old, but that is still a wall of text. What kids want is an interactive experience. This was our core process behind founding Sparkli,” Poojary told TechCrunch over a call. Image Credits:Sparkli Prior to launching Sparkli, Poojary and Kang co-founded a travel aggregator called Touring Bird and a video-focused social commerce app, Shoploop, at Google’s Area 120, the company’s internal startup incubator. Poojary later went on to work at Google and YouTube on shopping. Marchand, who is the CTO of Sparkli, was also one of the co-founders of Shoploop and later worked at Google. “When a kid asked what Mars looks like fifty years ago, we might have shown them a picture,” said Poojary. “Ten years ago, we might have shown them a video. With Sparkli, we want kids to interact and experience what Mars is like.” The startup said that education systems often fall behind in teaching modern concepts. Sparkli wants to teach kids about topics like skills design, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship by creating an AI-powered learning “expedition.” The app lets users explore some predefined topics in different categories or ask their own questions to create a learning path. The app also highlights one new topic every day to let kids learn something new. Kids can either listen ...