BookBot: Improving youth literacy through AI-powered chatbot
Youth literacy is declining, and when younger students experience delayed reading development, the impact is felt throughout their education. To tackle this challenge, a new initiative in the Netherlands is leveraging advanced technology to support early reading development and help improve literacy outcomes.
Literacy rates among young people are declining rapidly. When students struggle to develop essential reading skills, the lack of foundational literacy becomes even more problematic as they progress through the educational system, where higher education often lacks the resources to address these basic needs effectively.
A Dutch initiative in the Brainport region, around Eindhoven, has explored young students’ attitudes towards reading. The findings were clear: while students expressed a willingness to read books on topics that interested them, they frequently struggled to discover engaging material. Traditional search engines often fell short in guiding them, as students posed questions that the search engines couldn’t answer effectively. Moreover, the study revealed that students were more inclined to read when offered personalised recommendations by a chatbot, as these recommendations are based on extracted hobbies and interests from natural conversations held between the student and the chatbot.
In response, eight libraries in the region, with financial support from the Pica Foundation, have joined forces to tackle this challenge. The initiative focuses on leveraging advances in generative AI to build a chatbot that enables students to discover interesting books through natural, conversational interaction.
Initially, the project will focus on developing a Dutch-language chatbot, but given the international character of the region, the long-term vision is to create a multilingual tool that serves a wider audience, including both children and adults.
BookBot is interested in exploring the possibilities that European language models can offer beyond the mainstream solutions of major tech companies. This is where TrustLLM comes in. We are offering our expertise and collaborating with BookBot to explore new language models that could enhance the chatbot’s capabilities. This collaboration also provides our research project with a practical environment to evaluate and advance European language technologies.
