Read-Along AI: The Offline Reading Teacher | Build Small Hackathon

Read-Along AI is a patient, distraction-free reading assistant built for early readers. Designed for the Hugging Face "Build Small Hackathon" (Backyard AI Track), this app listens to a child read short sentences and provides instant, gentle, and developmentally appropriate feedback.

Using an ensemble of highly optimized small models ( sub-3B parameters total) including a fine-tuned MiniCPM phonetic evaluator, Cohere Transcribe / faster-whisper, and VoxCPM, Read-Along AI rewards real reading effort and accepts phonetic variants while catching genuine mistakes. Best of all, it features a 100% offline "Off the Grid" mode that runs locally on your machine, ensuring a child's voice data never enters a corporate data lake.

The entire application was orchestrated with OpenAI Codex (GPT-5.5) and features high-speed inference endpoints accelerated by Modal.

🔗 **Project Links:**
* **Live App (Hugging Face Space):** https://huggingface.co/spaces/build-small-hackathon/read-along-ai
* **GitHub Repository:** https://github.com/kingkw1/read-along-ai
* **Field Notes (How I Built It):** https://dev.to/kingkw1/building-read-along-ai-field-notes-from-a-small-model-reading-tutor-3e11
* **Agent Traces Dataset:** https://huggingface.co/datasets/kingkw1/read-along-ai-agent-traces

🏆 **Hackathon Badges & Tracks:**
Backyard AI • Off the Grid • Off-Brand • Llama Champion • Tiny Titan • Well-Tuned • Sharing is Caring • Field Notes

---

**Attributions & Credits:**
* **Background Music:** "Corporate Calm" created by PaulYudin
PaulYudin and provided by Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/music/corporate-calm-160676/)
* **Graphics:** Hackathon badge graphics provided by the official Hugging Face Build Small Hackathon page.
* **AI Imagery:** Select visual assets generated using Google Gemini.
* All other media, app design, and development by Kevin King.

#BuildSmallHackathon #HuggingFace #Gradio #MachineLearning #EdTech #OpenAICodex #Modal #SmallModels

Видео Read-Along AI: The Offline Reading Teacher | Build Small Hackathon канала Kevin King