To help youngsters understand news articles and stories, the Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education (APSCHE) has partnered with EdTech Reading Right. Smarticles — this is the intelligence-driven software that trims off all the jargon or complicated terms generally associated with news articles and cuts straight to the facts. After talks that have been going on for about three to four months, this partnership was forged in which students will be able to avail this service for free for one year. Reading Right is available on Android, iOS and a web version is available too. 

"Take any word, line or concept — just by clicking on it, the student can infer the meaning in four ways, via text, audio, video and images. Think of it as Wikipedia with ten times the power," shares Shrishti Jain, Founder-CEO of the start-up. There are many other features as well to look forward to which includes taking notes, highlighting portions and colour-coding them, bookmarking stories and other customised education tools. All this together makes it simpler for students to read and understand current affairs, a very important aspect of overall development. 

Though AI is the order of the day, Shrishti explains how all the concepts have been decoded by a 20-member (and growing) expert team. The app also provides reports regularly on the basis of how much content the student actually consumes. "You can't just walk into an article and convert the status to 'read'. We have authentic calculations done to understand how much time a student is spending on an article," she informs.  

All the courses and streams that fall under the APSCHE will be able to use Reading Right for free over a year and we are informed that even Principal Secretary, School Education, B Rajasekhar, has shown tremendous interest in enlisting the services of the app.