Knowledge
Learning assistant camera app Volley finds a backer in Zuckerberg Education Venture
Very soon, every time a child struggles with learning a new concept or with homework. All they will have to do is click a photo of the page and Volley, the new personal learning assistant will pick up all the relevant information on that topic of the net and present it to the student. Due to its sca
Volley’s team (from left): Zaid Rahman, Carson Kahn, Adam Ashwal, and Ryan Orbuch
Imagine your child’s very own personal learning assistant in the form of a smartphone app. An assistant that can instantly guide your child in learning concepts better by making accessible key resources online, key facts, prerequisites and links to snippets from online classes or study guides. Wait, it gets better, this assistant is language independent and needs nothing but a smartphone. Yes, Volley, thats the name is almost here, knocking on our doors.
For example, once students take a photo of the work they’re struggling with, Volley analyzes the text and imagery in seconds to determine the precise topics at hand and lets the user choose the right one from a list. It can then not only point them to chunks of Khan Academy courses and Wikipedia articles, but also little-known reference PDFs uploaded by a teacher on the other side of the country that they’d never be able to find by Googling.
The beauty of Volley is that it doesn’t cobble this info together manually, rather it uses cutting edge machine learning and natural language processing to do it all automatically.
That technology’s potential to create scalable personal learning assistant in every student’s pocket attracted Volley’s $2.3 million seed round led by Reach Capital and joined by Zuckerberg Education Ventures, an investment vehicle of the Facebook CEO and his wife Priscilla Chan. This investment round also includes Chinese education giant TAL plus angels from Apple, Dropbox, Blackboard, and Udemy.
The brains behind Voley are CEO Zaid Rahman who ran Dubai instructional tech consultancy Pilot Labs, former CEO of Keystone Learning Systems Carson Kahn, Apple Design Award-winning founder of Finish productivity app Ryan Orbuch, and machine learning plugin Liaison Vision developer Adam Ashwal.
There are plenty of one-size-fits-all online courses, but the product clarity to avoid building another remote tutoring service or set of online classes and instead, getting help with homework or studying for tests as easy as snapping a selfie is what enticed Zuckerberg Educaton Ventures. The fund wrote on Facebook “What excites us is how it will empower students to pace their self-study and direct their own learning.”
What helps Volley’s case further is that it can actually sit atop programs like Udemy, Khan Academy, or Coursera by drawing on their products instead of competing.
Image Courtesy: www.techcrunch.com