Partner Success with AWS / General Public Services / United States
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Worldreader and SoftwareOne: Using Generative AI on AWS to Advance Global Literacy
Discover how SoftwareOne helped Worldreader use AWS generative AI technology to create new digital content for global readers.
Developed
engaging digital content to help children read at least 25 books yearly
Streamlined
workflows through automation, enabling a small team to focus more on strategic goals
Enhanced
children's reading comprehension along with their social and emotional development
Overview
Worldreader aims to ignite a lifelong love of reading and learning in families and their children. Collaborating with AWS Partner SoftwareOne, Worldreader used AWS generative AI technology to create book-aligned activities (BAAs) for a selection of stories available under Creative Commons license. Using Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic Claude 3 Opus, SoftwareOne helped design and automate BAAs in multiple languages, increasing reader engagement, eliminating manual work, and helping young readers and their families bond while reading and discussing their favorite story.
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Opportunity | Making Reading Engaging and Interactive
Worldreader gets children reading so they can reach their potential. Through digital technology, Worldreader provides family-centered reading experiences to all children agedso they are inspired to explore a world of endless possibilities.
Worldreader’s reading experience BookSmart offers families a free digital library of thousands of captivating books and learning activities designed to motivate children and to read 25 or more books a year with understanding. Families can access locally sourced children’s books in multiple languages and motivational messaging, challenges, and rewards to get children excited about reading and build a positive learning environment at home. Since 2010, Worldreader has supported the literacy needs of over 22 million readers in more than 100 countries through mobile reading technology. In 2023, Worldreader was awarded the US Library of Congress Literacy Award, International Prize, for its work in advancing global literacy.
Worldreader is increasingly focused on book-aligned activities (BAAs), which are pre- and post-reading activities for parents and children that make reading more engaging and interactive. BAAs are divided into three categories:
● Read, focused on reading comprehension and vocabulary skills
● Play, offering games and fun activities
● Grow, focused on emotional learning concepts such as self-awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making
Creating fresh and meaningful BAAs is challenging for Worldreader’s small, agile team. “We have a very lean team, and producing meaningful activities aligned with stories is a labor-intensive effort. It’s especially difficult to continuously come up with fresh content that hasn’t been used before,” says Sonny Lacey, director of product at Worldreader. To overcome these challenges, the organization was interested in using generative AI technology to automate some of its content work, reducing the level of effort required to build BAAs from days to mere minutes.
The team also wanted to explore the use of generative AI to develop assessments and reading comprehension evaluations. “We already offer BAAs, so we were interested in building book-aligned tests to further engage readers,” Lacey says.
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“Generative AI allows us to create content that helps young readers become more self-aware and learn to empathize and interact with others. As a result, we can ultimately help readers build a better world.”
Sabrina Abreu González
Senior Manager, Digital Publishing, Worldreader
Solution | Working with SoftwareOne to Design a Generative AI Solution
After receiving funding from the AWS IMAGINE Grant, which supports nonprofits that are using cloud technology, Worldreader was introduced to AWS Partner SoftwareOne, a global provider of end-to-end software and cloud technology solutions. SoftwareOne designed and built a generative AI solution based on Amazon Bedrock and the Anthropic Claude 3 Opus large language model (LLM) framework. “Using Amazon Bedrock with Anthropic Claude 3 Opus, we created models containing prompts around book texts, with examples and explanations focused on BAAs,” says Maciej Dzieżyc, senior data scientist at SoftwareOne. “For example, we built specific rules to consider socioeconomic status.”
Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic Claude 3 Opus also allow Worldreader to support multiple languages in communities across the globe, including Swahili. “The Anthropic Claude 3 Opus model on Amazon Bedrock is fully capable of reading Swahili books without any translation,” says Dzieżyc. “It was easy for us to put Swahili into the model, and it delivered BAAs in a language that’s very close to a native speaker’s experience.” While building the solution, SoftwareOne used Amazon Web Services (AWS) serverless technologies including AWS Lambda to extract book text in an event-driven manner and to prepare it for a prompt from the AI model. Each digital book was stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, with AWS Step Functions automating the entire workflow. With a serverless architecture, Worldreader can scale cost-effectively as needed. “If Worldreader suddenly has 1,000 books to work on, they can scale to support the BAAs for each of those books,” says Dzieżyc.
Outcome | Enhancing Reader Engagement and Social Awareness
Working with SoftwareOne, Worldreader created BAAs that will ultimately increase reader engagement. “With SoftwareOne and AWS, we created digital content that went beyond our expectations in terms of creativity,” says Sabrina Abreu González, senior manager of digital publishing at Worldreader. “This is important for readers because they’re not seeing the same book-aligned activities over and over.”
By automating content and BAA creation, Worldreader can focus on strategic goals and reduce reliance on external consultants. “With automation, we’ve removed the manual effort of relying on humans to study past BAAs to make sure we’re not reproducing something we’ve already done,” Lacey says.
The team can prioritize improving literacy and reading comprehension while helping children become more socially aware. “Generative AI allows us to create content that helps young readers become more self-aware and learn to empathize and interact with others,” González says. “As a result, we can ultimately help readers build a better world.”
About Worldreader
Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Worldreader is a global edtech nonprofit with a mission to get children reading so they can reach their potential. The organization has supported the literacy needs of over 22 million readers in more than 100 countries since it was founded in 2010.
About AWS Partner SoftwareOne
SoftwareOne, an AWS Partner, provides end-to-end software and cloud technology solutions. The company helps its customers build, migrate, manage, and modernize their applications and workloads.
AWS Services Used
Amazon Bedrock
Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities you need to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI.
AWS Lambda
Compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources.
Learn more »
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
AWS Step Functions
Step Functions is a visual workflow service that helps developers use AWS services to build distributed applications, automate processes, orchestrate microservices, and create data and machine learning (ML) pipelines.
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