Turn your kid's favorite books into phonics readers
A parent built a free phonics reading app for his six-year-old; connected agents like Claude or ChatGPT can type in owned books or write stories using only sounds she knows.
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What they did
A father built a reading app for his daughter after she finished a phonics game. She taps any word to hear its sounds. Parents set which sounds the child knows. They can connect their own AI agent, hand it a PDF or phone photos of a book they own, and have it import the book or write new stories.
How it went
The author reports the agent checks its own words, adds pictures and shows the parent the result, kept private to their account. Included stories are free to reuse.
Worth knowing
The built-in checker rejects any word the child can't sound out yet; the author's advice is to rewrite the story rather than loosen the sounds.
Try it yourself
Using the Yara Reads connection, import the book in [PDF or photos of a book I own] for my child. My child knows these sounds: [list of sounds] and these tricky words: [list]. Check every word against what they know. Where a word uses a sound they haven't learned, suggest a simpler rewrite and list the changes for me. Add simple pictures for each page. Show me the finished draft and wait for my approval before saving it to my account.
Swap the highlighted [parts] for your own details.
Source: Hacker News · zoozla (finereli) · Oct 19, 2026
Written with AI assistance from the original post and checked against our editorial guidelines. Results are as reported by the source, not independently verified. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.
