Open-source early-reading reader with phonics help
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My kid is 6 y/o and she is learning to read. She's moved through the basic phonics with Teach Your Monster to Read but was struggling with how repetitive it was. I wanted to give her some stories to read, but she still needed help sounding words out - and I wanted her to have the experience of sitting and reading by herself.So I built this book reader app to allow her to click on the words, sound out the phonemes, and read by herself.My 12 year old son wrote the first story, there's a cliffhanger at the end and he's working on the next section.We're going to release more chapters and more stories in the near future.And there's one other thing -The reader has an MCP connection, so you can connect your Claude or ChatGPT or Grok, give them a PDF of a book you like (or even a set of scans done quickly with a phone camera) and have them import your favorite books into the app (private to your account, for your own kid, if you own the book of course).The reader is free to use on its website and open source if you want to tinker and create your own version.The included stories are under Creative Commons.
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HN · launched Oct 19, 2026 · 23 upvotes (top 30%)
- Education
- Vertical SaaS
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Similar launches
See all 289 similar launches →Could you build this?
Yes It's a web reader that shows stories with sounded-out word help, which can be built with standard web tech, text-to-speech, and some decodable story content.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Reading TLC, Living Books
Concerns raised: Incorrect single-phoneme mapping for letters, Mixes American and British pronunciations, Arbitrarily labels regular words as difficult, No audio output on iOS devices, Flawed educational foundation for children
Feature requests: Support for other languages, Convert from ARPABET to IPA, Support for Unicode character sets
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 289 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #125 of 290 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 348 days after the earliest competitor.
- Early Reader · hn · 2026-04-14 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.75
- Croco Story · ph · 2026-10-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- BookVoice Kids — Turn Books Into Audio · ph · 2026-09-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- TeddyReads · ph · 2026-10-15 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- SnowReader · ph · 2026-09-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- ReadiBean · ph · 2026-10-24 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- BukaBoom: Learn to Read Aloud · ph · 2026-10-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Read while you listen to your Audiobooks · hn · 2026-09-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.