Ello is an AI reading coach for children founded in 2019 by CEO Tom Sayer, formerly head of impact and adoption programs at Google for Education, alongside co-founders Dr. Elizabeth Adams and Catalin Voss, a then-PhD candidate in AI at Stanford.
Proprietary speech-recognition technology listens to a child read a physical book out loud in real time, catching mispronunciations and missed words, then applies phonics-based instruction methods developed with reading specialists who focus on dyslexia intervention. The company's own benchmark claims its reading-tracking speech model beat Google Cloud's speech API by 30% on the specific task of following a child's oral reading.
Ello is built for children roughly ages 4-9, starting once a child can read a sentence like "I am a cat." The subscription costs $14.99/month or $139/year and ships physical books alongside the app, with a discounted $2.99/month rate available to families receiving government assistance.
