Hello Wonder | Creates an AI-Powered Browser for Kids
Hello Wonder will solve the difficult equation of protecting our children! Around the world, regulatory bodies have stepped up their efforts to try to increase children’s safety online. The major social networks are facing scrutiny, and as a countermeasure, they are trying to roll out tools to protect children.
The main issue is focusing on the content that appears on children’s screens and how to make it safe. While many of these efforts are aimed at teenagers, young children also use devices to consume content. So a trio of founders who have worked at companies like Google and Amazon are trying to create an AI-powered browser/companion to create a safe environment for children to learn and explore through Hello Wonder.
What is Hello Wonder?
The company currently has an iPad app — which parents have full control over — that lets kids ask questions to an AI-powered chatbot and get answers, videos, and interactive experiences that are safe for them. The startup believes that existing content tools like YouTube Kids are too focused on engagement and don’t give parents enough insight into what their kids are consuming, which is the problem the company aims to solve.
Hello Wonder has raised $2.1 million from investors including Designer Fund, a16z Scout Fund, Ground Up Ventures, and Chasing Rainbows. Other investors include PocketWatch CEO Chris Williams, Things, Inc founder Jason Toff, and MESH CEO Tony Fai, an electronics company.
Hello Wonder was founded by Seth Raphael, who led Google’s AI prototyping teams and helped create the first version of Google Photos; Brian Backus, who has worked as a game producer at Amazon, Disney, DreamWorks, and NBCUniversal; and Daniel Shepelkoff, a product designer who worked on Google’s Material Design guidelines.
Why Hello Wonder uses Ai
Raphael built the app out of necessity while raising five children under the age of 12 during the COVID-19 pandemic. He told TechCrunch that while he saw the potential for AI to help kids while he was in college, the technology wasn’t mature. “The fundamental problem is that you and I use the internet wonderfully every day and get tremendous value from it, but we can’t let our kids do that because there’s real harm,” Raphael said. “Plus, young kids don’t have the ability or the tools to find content that’s useful to them.”
Raphael said he started by trying to find the best content for his kids. But that got limited when the kids wanted to explore a particular topic further. He then got inspired by the Montessori method of learning, which involves hands-on learning and activities based on children’s interests. That led the company to build an AI-powered environment to safely pull content from across the internet.
How to make Ai browser for kids?
The company allows parents to control what kind of content — videos, games, and material from websites — their kids consume. They can get text messages about all types of videos or choose to get a daily or weekly summary of their consumption. Parents and guardians can tell the AI through the parental interface in natural language what content they want and don’t want their kids to consume.
For example, if a family wants to help their child learn to play the violin, they can tell Hello Wonder about it, and the tool will find and insert content about learning to play the violin from time to time. KHello Wonder, which is aimed at children aged five to ten, also allows them to interact with trusted family contacts through in-app messages and video calls.
Jordan Odinsky, partner at Ground Up Ventures, said Hello Wonder solves the problem of kids seeing unsafe content by involving AI and having it scan content to see if it's safe before serving it to kids.
“Existing app services for kids’ safety systems don’t go far enough. As a browser, Hello Wonder doesn’t sit with kids in any one box. They are free to explore with AI monitoring them. They can consume any type of content as long as it aligns with their parents’ values, giving them a real internet experience,” he told TechCrunch over a call.
Ai Browser grows as your kids grow.
Odinsky added that the app can also be adapted as the child grows and show content that reflects that growth, saying the app has no problem presenting an empty search box for kids and leaving them clues about what they want to ask.
“Wonder is built differently. When kids log in, they’re prompted with ideas to explore. From there, it sparks new ideas to explore that you can simply input by speaking. A lot of the things browsers handle, from exploration to discovery to figuring out the best prompts to achieve a desired outcome, have been removed from the Wonder experience,” he noted.
The company doesn't charge for the app at the moment but will offer a subscription tier in the future. It's also testing expanding the app to Android tablets and Chromebooks.