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Hi Ammis & friends!

Welcome to the 🍃 Premium Patch, where we share fresh perspectives from fellow Ammis & friends on AI and their areas of expertise.

Back in January, I attended the Common Sense Media Summit in San Francisco, where I met many amazing parents, educators, technologists, and policymakers on a similar mission: to build a healthy digital future for our families.

I was delighted to meet Rex Duval, who founded a company that uses AI to generate educational stories for children. I was also excited to spot Radwa Hamed, a LinkedIn connection whom I was looking forward to meeting in-person to learn about the company she was building. It wasn’t until I saw them together that it clicked: they were co-founders of the same company!

I loved learning about their backgrounds, the story behind their app, and the app itself, so I was delighted when they agreed to share their unique insights with the ammi.ai community!

Today, we’ll learn how Radwa and Rex’s paths converged and led them to co-found Nookly, an AI-powered storytelling app. We’ll also learn their perspectives on building safe, quality AI for a particularly challenging demographic: children!

👩‍🌾 Let’s dig in!

Radwa and Rex on Educational Storytelling + AI

Get to know Radwa and Rex

Ruqaiya: How would you fill in this blank to describe your relationship with AI? __________.ai

Radwa: If I had to choose one word, I would say intentional. I've been working with machine learning since 2015, and I've noticed that some applications are done without thinking deeply about the implications. So, I try to be very intentional, especially if you're giving autonomy to something beyond a human.

Rex: For me, I think the word would be superpower. Superpowers can be used for good to help people and make the world better. But villains also have superpowers, so, as the cliche goes, with great power comes great responsibility.

Ruqaiya: Could you share a bit about your paths in life and work up to this point?

Rex: I come from a very creative family - my grandpa is a dancer, my grandma is a dancer and singer, and my sister is an actress. Everyone just stole all my talent!

Having permission to think outside the box was embedded early on. Also, my dad is a nonprofit founder, so I saw entrepreneurship - creating something and taking ownership of it - modeled by him.

I started a business in college, making an ankle therapy product. Though it wasn’t the global success we envisioned, it was my first early experience with entrepreneurship. After college, I joined a SaaS startup and then did public sector consulting, but I missed the startup pace. When I applied to business school, I knew entrepreneurship would interest me.

Radwa: Growing up, I was obsessed with everything childhood-related— I loved Disney and Harry Potter. In fact, my wedding was Harry Potter-themed! The only thing missing was that I couldn't see myself represented in those characters and stories. I always thought: it could be better; we can do better. I knew I wanted to work on something that impacted childhood one way or the other and also work very closely with emotions.

I studied Computer and Electronics Engineering at the American University of Cairo, where I was initially exposed to AI and machine learning. I figured I’d just join Microsoft and be one of the great engineers who builds iconic apps like Microsoft Word. But after interning at Google a few times, I realized I wanted to work at a smaller company with more impact. I had the opportunity to work at a startup based out of Boston, and the CEO was Egyptian which was pretty inspiring.

I then joined Stanford, where I focused on building impactful products and then learned how to take products to market.

The ‘Spark’ that Started Nookly

Ruqaiya: Wow, very distinct paths, and now I would love to know how your paths converged! How did you two meet, and what was the spark that ignited Nookly? Did the idea behind Nookly come first, or did y’all meet each other and then come up with Nookly?

Rex: A few years ago, I was home with my wife Micah, who was in a doctorate program for clinical psychology. She works with young kids and was frustrated preparing a "social story" for a young patient the next day. These stories engage kids and facilitate learning, but the tools for creating them were really time-consuming for her, especially finding characters that looked like her diverse patients.

I reached out to a friend at Stanford who suggested talking to Radwa, who loved storytelling and had great technical expertise. We had an initial conversation in November 2021 about how to make this process faster, more accessible, and higher quality.

Ruqaiya: Finding a trusted partner to build a business with is kind of a huge deal. What made you realize you wanted to commit to starting and building Nookly together?

Radwa: Rex and I just clicked from the first few calls - same sense of humor. But I was especially driven by his focus on the impact for the users - how much this could change the lives of kids who are struggling with achieving milestones and relieve pressure on overwhelmed parents.

On the product side, my background is in human memory and perception - my thesis even involved storing my mom's voice in a necklace to help with isolation during COVID. So, the idea of personalizing content for families and providing a sense of security and groundedness for children really gets me fired up.

Rex: Something really important to me from my earlier entrepreneurship experience was doing it with someone I could launch with and didn't take themselves too seriously because I certainly don't take myself too seriously. Radwa and I bonded over being vulnerable with each other, too. We share core values that we've been able to discuss openly. But the sense of humor was the immediate connection.

Behind-the-Scenes: Crafting a Safe, Nurturing AI Experience

Q: Empathy and humor seem like great foundations for a storytelling app for kids; I’m glad y’all found each other! Can you describe the journey from the problem to the product? And who or what is your inspiration as you build and iterate on Nookly?

Rex: The journey from where it was to where it is now - we kicked off really focused on understanding the story creation process from a professional perspective because I live with a professional. But we didn't limit our understanding of how stories are used to interact with kids in professional settings, since stories are used at home as well.

As we started talking to more and more parents in particular, we realized it wasn't just a challenge around accessing relatable visuals for a particular population, like autistic children, for example. It was a broader challenge that parents face in the home around how their kids interact with digital content. A lot of existing online content for kids on YouTube, for example, is engaging but not necessarily high-quality, high-value content.

As we thought about that in the context of our initial exposure to the problem, we're like, let's take a step back and think about how, we can harness the power of AI to deliver personalized, high-quality digital content in a scalable way. We wanted to combine the fantastic aspects of digital media that keep kids engaged with the professional insight that we have on delivering personalized, educational stories.

Now, our focus is allowing parents to identify the learning goals that they have for their kids, like ‘how to share’ or ‘how to be a kind sibling’ and using AI to pull from how professionals would teach that principle from a social-emotional learning perspective to deliver that content. Our Large Language Model (LLM) is pulling from those professional resources to develop the storyline. We also use AI to create really engaging visuals that are tailored to the kids so they can see themselves in the content. The LLM is improved based on the feedback we're getting from professionals.

Our guiding light is not to lose that sense of impact we're driving toward with the kid at the center of what we're doing. We don't want to just be a big platform that keeps kids' attention fixed on it; we want it to be nurturing to them.

Radwa: I want to drill a bit deeper into the problems with the existing digital content. For the last 15 years, parents and kids have sort of been forced into this silo that educational content is not entertaining and entertaining content is not educational. Platforms like YouTube incentivize addictiveness, so shows like Cocomelon optimize to keep kids focused on their videos. This results in children’s decreasing attention spans.

Prior to 2010, you had shows like Sesame Street and shows on PBS Kids, where the content had to meet educational standards in order to be shown to the child. And it was still entertaining.

Our vision is to strike the right balance between educational and engaging content, without being overstimulating. And of course, empowering parents with personalization so they can teach their child concepts and values with their cultural nuances and representation that we just haven’t had before.

Ruqaiya: Can you share the story behind your name and cute unicorn logo?

Radwa: It took us 2 weeks to come up with a name, and we're really proud of ‘Nookly’ because it embodies this coziness of spending quality time with your family, but also being educational. We wanted to have a character that embodies both as well - this coziness, but also ambition and growth. We think of the Nookly unicorn as the vessel for that.

We iterated a lot—at some point, we had a giraffe and a hot air balloon. Rex really wanted a dinosaur to match his name. We eventually ended up with a unicorn.

Q: Who are the types of users or parents for whom this is the right experience?

Radwa: During our conversations with parents and educators, we found common ground—both are using visuals as a tool to communicate with the child. Educators have more capacity to spend time building that stuff, but they lack the tools and resources. On the flip side, parents emphasize convenience and really care about getting access to it fast and safely.

With that in mind, our core user is the parent. Specifically, the parents of kids who need support to achieve developmental milestones, where the parent bears the weight of this challenge to teach their child.

We learned that younger children, below age 6, don't require high levels of animation to be engaged. They can look at stories where they see themselves with minimal animation and feel represented and get excited quickly. That's how we've been building the product.

From the tech point of view, we built the technology where we feed in our own LLM that is fine-tuned on social-emotional learning content. We use input from 40% of our users who are professionals, and that feedback loop ensures our LLM continuously improves.

On the image side, we've accumulated almost 50,000 images of synthetic data, which protects IP and allows us to make the characters more engaging and personalized for the child.

Ruqaiya: How are you ensuring that your app is safe, especially as part of the core experience is getting the child's name and personal details to provide that personalized experience?

Rex: There are a few ways we do it. The first is meeting the strict legal requirements of data safety and not compromising on that front.

The second is the decision we've made to have parents very involved in the process. Right now, children don't have accounts themselves. We've got parents very much in the loop - they can view and edit the storyline and images before they’re shown to the child. We believe in putting the power into the hands of the parents in an appropriate way, making sure the parents are effectively able to deliver what they want to their children. We don't want to take the parent out of the loop.

Radwa: I'll add that we're actually facing the counter problem where we're over-enforcing safety. We have a layer that filters out unsafe prompts from the LLM, which blocks the whole story. We're getting feedback from parents who want to teach things like potty training or how to take a shower, which are challenging subjects to teach. Until we are confident we can do so safely, generating those images flags many words as inappropriate for the model.

So we're trying to figure out how to serve the scenarios a parent would want in a setting that is appropriate from their perspective without triggering the model. It's an over-enforcement problem rather than an under-enforcement problem, which is good - I'd rather not show something and learn a parent would want it rather than show something unsafe or offensive.

Ruqaiya: Many of these measures are not necessarily enforced but rather something you are doing as ethical founders building technology responsibly. Do you feel there needs to be more government regulation in this space - why or why not?

Rex: It's a fascinating question. I think when it comes to data safety and integrity, we're definitely for the highest standards. The aspects around interpretability and explainability of models can inhibit innovation if we have to explain our models in the same way a big company would. Regulation on that front would make it harder for us to innovate as a small startup. It's a complicated subject we're still developing clarity around.

Ruqaiya: What makes your app unique amongst other AI-generated story apps that exist or are possibly being built?

Rex: Our focus on learning content is really important. Going back to that north star component, we want our stories to have a learning message embedded in them. We engage with the professionals to get better at delivering that and build trust with the parents we're serving, because there is such an absence of trust when it comes to screen time.

Another differentiator is the story-telling experience we provide. While there are a ton of tools out there, we've focused on having multiple images, building consistency across those images, and having a style that will engage kids through personalization.

What’s in Radwa and Rex’s Tech Stack? 🪴 

💻️ Radwa 💻️ 

Apple or Android: Apple

Mac or PC: Mac. Everything Apple. Even my mug is Apple! I worked at Apple, and I love great user interfaces. I love Apple.

Favorite technology: Canva - it’s my favorite app.

Tech-rec (recommendation) for Ammis and friends: Soul Cycle - the app and the actual brick-and-mortar studio.

I have been recently obsessed with being part of an uplifting workout community that cares about my mental and physical well-being and also allows me to have fun with it.

💻️ Rex 💻️

Apple or Android: Apple

Mac or PC: So I'm a little bit of a heretic. iPhone, AirPods, Apple Watch, iPad, but PC for my laptop. But there's logic to it: when I was going into business school, in the back of my mind I was interested in entrepreneurship, but I thought I was going to go to the corporate world. And so I was like, you know what, I gotta make sure I have all my shortcuts down, and it runs on PC still. So I'm still living with that decision.

Favorite technology: It's this app called Hatch. It's a software and physical product integration. It's a wake-up light that simulates the sunrise, and I can customize how I want my wake-up experience to be on the app, like what birds I want to wake up listening to. It's such a key part of my wake-up routine that I have a hard time imagining my life without that right now.

Tech-rec (recommendation) for Ammis and friends: Honestly, the ChatGPT app on my phone has been really helpful. That and the Perplexity app, I find really really helpful. Maybe the slight plug for Perplexity on that, actually. That's like the mobile thing I rely on now most.

🌾 Cream of the Crop

Many thanks to Radwa and Rex for sharing their invaluable insights and helping us grow.

🍃 Connect with Radwa, Rex, and Nookly on Linkedin to follow their incredible work!

🍃 Follow @mynookly on Instagram!

🍃 Keep an eye out for our next edition of ammi.ai, where we do a deeper dive on Nookly, and go ahead and try it out!

Thank you for spending a few of your precious, precious minutes with us.

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See y’all soon!
Ruqaiya
Ammi by day, Ammi by night