Three mother and father—Reni Cao, Xiao Zhang, and Susan Rosenthal—had been nervous about their kids’s display screen time, in order that they left their tech jobs to create a product that encourages kids to have interaction with the true world whereas additionally serving to them be taught a brand new language. Their transfer has paid off, as the corporate not too long ago raised $4.8 million in funding.
The newly launched gadget is known as Dex and resembles a high-tech magnifying glass with a digicam lens on one aspect and a touchscreen on the opposite. When children use the system to take footage of objects, the AI makes use of picture recognition expertise to establish the article and interprets the phrase into the chosen language. It additionally options interactive story classes and video games.
Whereas kid-focused language studying apps like Duolingo Children exist, Dex argues that it takes a extra partaking method that emphasizes hands-on experiences, permitting kids to immerse themselves within the language.
“We’re making an attempt to show genuine language in the true world in a means that’s interactive,” Cao advised TechCrunch. “The youngsters will not be solely listening or doing what they’re advised to do, however somewhat, they’re really pondering, creating, interacting, working round, and simply being interested in issues, and purchase the required language related to these ideas and objects.”
Dex is designed for youths ages 3 to eight years outdated and at present helps Chinese language, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. It additionally presents assist for 34 dialects, together with Egyptian Arabic, Taiwanese Mandarin, and Mexican Spanish.
Along with object recognition, Dex includes a library of interactive tales that encourage kids to actively take part within the narrative. Because the story unfolds, children are prompted to reply, similar to greeting characters within the language they’re studying.
The system comes with a devoted app for fogeys to see an in depth overview of their little one’s progress, together with the vocabulary phrases they’ve discovered, the tales they’ve engaged with, and the variety of consecutive days they’ve used Dex.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
Moreover, Dex is at present growing a characteristic that enables children to ask an AI chatbot questions and have interaction in free-form conversations. This characteristic is already accessible to some testers, however the firm admits it isn’t prepared for a wider rollout. Dad and mom may also be cautious about introducing AI chatbots to their kids.
Throughout our testing of Dex, we had considerations about the opportunity of a baby studying inappropriate phrases. Cao assured us that “inflexible security prompts” are included at any time when the massive language mannequin is used throughout imaginative and prescient, reasoning, and text-to-speech.
He stated, “We’ve got an always-on security agent that evaluates conversations in real-time and filters conversations with a protected cease thesaurus. The agent will suppress dialog if any of the cease phrases are talked about, together with however not restricted to these associated to sexuality, faith, politics, and many others. Dad and mom will quickly have the ability to additional add to personalised cease phrase lists.”
Plus, it stated that the AI is skilled utilizing vocabulary requirements just like these present in Britannica Children and different kids’s encyclopedias.
In our testing, the AI efficiently ignored matters associated to nudity. Nonetheless, it did acknowledge and precisely translate the time period “gun,” one thing mother and father ought to think about when buying the system.
In response to our findings, Cao advised us, “Regulation-wise, I’m not nervous, however I do suppose this presents a priority, particularly amongst [some] mother and father.” He added that these considerations have pushed the corporate to quickly introduce an choice in settings to filter out particular phrases, similar to weapons, cigarettes, vape pens, fireworks, marijuana, and beer bottles.
Dex additionally has a zero knowledge retention coverage. Whereas this implies there’s no danger of delicate or private photographs being saved, one draw back might be that folks are left at the hours of darkness about the kind of content material their children could also be capturing.
Dex can also be actively working in direction of acquiring COPPA certification, which might make it compliant with the Kids’s On-line Privateness Safety Act.
The corporate secured funding from ClayVC, EmbeddingVC, Parable, and UpscaleX. Notable angel traders embody Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann, Curated co-founder Eduardo Vivas, Lillian Weng, who’s the previous head of security at OpenAI, and Richard Wong (ex-Coursera).
The system is priced at $250, which feels steep for a product designed for youngsters. Nonetheless, Dex positions itself as a extra inexpensive various to hiring a tutor, which may cost as much as $80 per hour, or attending a language immersion faculty, which may price a number of hundred to even 1000’s of {dollars}.
Dex says that tons of of households have already bought the system.