Exploring AI-Powered Learning with MiiApps – Featuring Nancy Sun

Welcome to Who Are These Startups?

podcast shorts featuring founder interviews of Canadian startups.

It's a startup coach here and I'm back at collision with Nancy Sun of MiApps.

Can you introduce yourself and tell us about MiApps?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm Nancy Sun.

I've been in the tech industry for a really long time, in the past always from a B2B perspective.

And from some personal side, which I'll go into a little bit later, we decided to use AI for better.

And the idea of MiApps and our flagship product, StoryMi, essentially is to help kids read better.

And we wanted to make it as inclusive as possible, and we want to make sure that we target all children as much as we can.

So that is the product in a nutshell, essentially using AI to create stories, and our reading platform for kids between the ages of two to twelve.

And then, like I said, we sort of try to make it as inclusive as possible, so we have a lot of neurodivergent features in there.

And really targeting children, we feel like being lost a little bit in the system, and not getting as much material in a traditional sense of learning.

It feels like there's more of a story behind this.

What inspired you to start this?

Yeah, absolutely.

So even before my son was diagnosed with ADHD, we really started to notice that during story time at a very, very young age, he just wasn't concentrating, he couldn't get into it.

And it doesn't matter what book we were putting in front of him, it could be a topic matter that he loves, it could be cars, something he was obsessed with for a really long time.

But after a couple of pages, he was just, you know, he was kind of wandering off, his mind wasn't quite there.

And we're starting to notice that it was impeding in his way to speak in learning language, where's what we saw within our daughter.

I know you're never supposed to compare your children, but you saw how my daughter really loved books and she took to reading and she took to language and she was speaking at a very young age.

So we kind of thought, well, the fact that he's not going down that road made it much tougher for him.

And so when ChatGPT came out, now we've been working with AI, both of us, for a long time on a B2B side, right?

AI's not as new as people think it is, it's just new to the consumer.

But when ChatGPT came out, we tried it.

We said, hey, why don't you tell us what you want in a story today?

And so he went in and he kind of, you know, had a character description or that something.

He loved it for the first couple of days.

And then there was no images, at least not good images.

And so that kind of started to wane.

And then when Dalai III came out, he, you know, that revitalized again.

And he was like, oh, amazing, I can now have the story that I created and now I can have the images.

But it was still not on one platform.

So that's where the story kind of came about.

We started talking to, and then during that whole process, he was diagnosed with ADHD as we suspected.

And then so we started getting into that community, starting talking to mothers, neurodivergent specialists.

We're like, hey, is this something you think that kids with ADHD specifically at the time could really benefit from?

And then from there, we started talking about parents with kids with dyslexia, certain parts of autism on the spectrum.

And they kind of, they all really adapted to the idea and that's how the product came about.

So now it is in the app store and Google, Google Play.

And what makes your technology different than anything else?

Okay, so this is interesting, I think, because obviously with ChagYPT, everyone says, right, like if you walk around collision, the amount of AI that you see is obviously astronomical.

So from our business background as well as our technology background, the way we look at it is, it's not so much what AI can do, but what are the problems that society is facing?

Or what are the problems that the world is facing and how can AI come in and help solve those issues?

And so instead of just saying, hey, AI can create kids stories, great.

We want to make sure that there's issues that we can solve.

So one of them I've already spoken about, which is a neurodivergent aspect.

So we really want to hone in and make sure that not only do we have accessibility features in our app, reading masks, the text in a certain manner so that like certain words kind of pop out at kids with neurodivergencies, but also the way it's written.

So for ADHD, for example, it's something that I've researched probably the most about, sentences have to be shorter.

They just have to be really kind of like punch in your face, not a lot of flowery words and a lot of action.

So my son, because of these type of changes, not only now enjoy story time, the comprehension has gone through the roof.

We asked him at the end of a very complex story and he can tell you very specific details because now he's interested.

The other aspect that we kind of looked at was what has children always gravitated towards, right?

Like if you have anyone who has children knows they have a pile of garbage on the side that it's just like toys that come in the house.

Within two months it's just a pile of, you know, literally going into minefields.

The only thing in my household that stayed is Lego, Play-Doh, coloring, anything where the children's imagination is also employed within that process.

Reading hasn't changed for hundreds of years.

Somebody writes a story, somebody reads the story.

So why not leverage technology to be able to have children and their amazing minds and imaginations and pull it all together?

The third aspect that we want to make sure to put in this is the language learning aspect.

So my daughter, this actually came from her, great English reader, terrible at French, something she's learning in school.

So how do we leverage AI, which is so amazing.

Now Google, obviously we have everyone's use Google translate at some point in their life, whether it's a contract or what have you.

But what we've noticed is that it doesn't take the nuance of how a language is truly spoken, right?

Like it translates it very in a very direct manner.

So the way our app works is that you can create a story, for example, for my daughter who's seven.

She reads it in English and then it gets translated, but also translated down in age.

So it's not just translated, it gets rewritten in French for a three-year-old.

Same plot, same characters, but then it's rewritten for a three-year-old so then she can learn vocabulary, sentence structure from a very simplistic way.

From a story she already is familiar with.

And the last aspect is that we really want it to be this again, this inclusion aspect of it.

So we call ourselves the YouTube of Kids Stories.

So once you make a story, you can publish it on our platform and that's free to read for any kids.

So, you know, we already have three, four thousand stories on the platform.

We're hoping to reach a million before year-end and they're all stories created by kids for kids.

So even if you can't necessarily pay for the service of creating your own stories, now you have a platform you can go on and potentially find someone who resonates with you.

Similar issues, similar, you know, similar, some of the ideologies, background experiences, so forth.

And hopefully that brings you some kind of solace in, you know, whatever it is that you're going through as a child.

And what brings you to collision this year?

Well, you know, just to get to know more about the community, the startup world, and of course, you know, getting our brand out there.

Because I think it's a good one.

I think it's also a story of using AI for good.

And I think in this particular space, in the education space, people have always looked at AI in a very negative connotation.

Oh, kids are going to use it to cheat and they're not going to learn.

And the truth of the matter is technology can always be used as a double-edged sword for good or evil.

And in my opinion, this is one way that we can kind of use that technology for good.

And I think, you know, the collision is a perfect platform for us to kind of come in and showcase the issues that we see and how we can use this great new technology to kind of address, I think, a group of children that maybe have been missed throughout history, that we can hopefully close the gap and help them move up and be at the same playing field or close to being at the same playing field as their neural, normal counterparts.

Yeah, and like a hammer, AI is just a tool that can be used to build or used to destroy, depending on what you want to do.

Absolutely, yeah.

Where can people go and find out more?

So our website, meappsmiapps.com, always a good place to start.

But we are also an app store, as well as Google Play, same thing, just give it a quick Google, M-I-I, sorry, it's under story me, S-T-O-R-Y, and then M-I-I.

And you'll see it and you can download it.

We can, right now, you know, there's a, as soon as you sign on, you can do a story for free, you can do a translation for free.

And then, you know, like I said, as soon as you sign on, you'll see that community portion.

So there's thousands of stories you can already peruse.

So even if you're not quite ready to maybe dial on to the service, which is a child safe product, by the way, we've always done all of our research on that as well.

There's thousands and thousands of stories that you can read to your children for free.

I really appreciate you taking the time, Nancy, out of the busy day at Collision, to talk to us.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you so much, Craig.

This has been Who Are These Startups?

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