Silika

The problem

My brother needed to get ahead in reading, and the apps built for that grade a child in private and mail a score to one parent. That misses the thing that actually moves an eight-year-old: the rest of the family knowing what he is working on this week and being able to say something about it. The constraint was that it had to cost near nothing to run and had to be usable by a child who cannot type a password.

What I did

1. 01

   Used the browser's own Web Speech API for both recognition and synthesis rather than a paid transcription service — it is free, runs on-device, and no recording of a child's voice ever leaves the machine

2. 02

   Graded each sentence word by word so the feedback is specific, and kept a quiet running list of the words he missed instead of showing him a score to feel bad about

3. 03

   Re-presented the same sentence as scrambled chips to reassemble, so the second pass practises structure rather than repeating the first attempt

4. 04

   Tiered the models by job: Haiku 4.5 for the family chat, Sonnet 5 for the tutor. Paying frontier prices for a chat prompt is waste

5. 05

   Gave him PIN sign-in while the adults use username and password, because auth a child cannot complete is auth that does not get used

6. 06

   Put row-level security on every table, since the data is a named minor's learning record and six family accounts read from the same database

Outcome

• Runs at roughly a dollar a month. The speech layer is free by design; the two chat features are the only paid component and the app degrades gracefully to a message when the API key is absent

• In daily use by the reader it was built for, with six family accounts around him — the reason it exists is engagement, and that is the only metric that would mean anything at this scale

• Reading, maths and family messaging in one loop a child will open twice, with curated Khan Academy units behind each maths skill rather than practice generated from nothing

• Private storage buckets and RLS on every table, so a family member sees the reader's progress and nothing else