ReportWire

Tag: personal story

  • Why I Built AI Kiddo, A Kids Vocabulary App (and How) – Dragos Roua

    [ad_1]

    When our one-year-old started to watch cartoons on iPad, we mostly used YouTube. He learned very soon how to scroll, how to pick new videos from the “related” column, and, sometimes, he even accidentally subscribed to some channels.

    The Accidental UX Researcher

    The more he watched, the more a clear UX pattern emerged. He didn’t care about the content — he cared about the interaction. Swipe. Tap. Something happens. Swipe again. New thing. Tap again. Sound comes out. That loop was deeply satisfying for him, and, honestly, it was fascinating to watch. A one-year-old who can’t form full sentences yet, but who had already internalized the core interaction patterns of one of the most used apps on the planet.

    And that’s when the question hit me.

    So one day I thought: “what if I mimicked the same UX on iPad, but with different content? Instead of the main video, some object image. The related column will scroll to related objects. And instead of Subscribe, we will have buttons to SPEAK that word in Romanian, English, and Vietnamese?”

    Three Languages, One Kitchen Table

    Now, a bit of context here. Our family is a beautiful linguistic mess. I’m Romanian, my wife is Vietnamese, and we talk to each other in English. So our kid is essentially growing up in a trilingual household, which is both a gift and a daily coordination challenge. At any given moment, the same object on the kitchen table has three names, and all three are correct.

    This multilingual reality is what made the idea click. YouTube was teaching him to swipe and tap, but it wasn’t teaching him words — at least not the words we wanted him to learn, in the languages we needed him to hear.

    It took me less than half of an afternoon to make the MVP, so we started to test. The first version was rough — just a handful of household items with images, a scrollable list on the right, and three language buttons. That’s it. No animations, no fancy design, just the bones of the idea.

    Initially, he was surprised there was no video, but the UX patterns were the same. He scrolled, he clicked, and he tapped the language buttons. Within minutes, he was navigating the app the same way he navigated YouTube. He’d pick an object — say, a chair — see the image, and then tap the Romanian button. “Scaun.” Tap the Vietnamese button. “Ghế.” Tap English. “Chair.” Then scroll to the next object and do it all over again.

    That was the moment I knew this wasn’t just a weekend hack. This was something real.

    That’s how AI Kiddo was born.

    From MVP to App Store

    I spent the next few weeks turning the MVP into a proper app. Built it in SwiftUI, kept it lean and focused. No backend, no analytics, no third-party SDKs — this is a kids’ app, and I take that seriously. Everything runs locally on the device. The text-to-speech uses Apple’s built-in AVSpeechSynthesizer, which means it works offline and doesn’t send any data anywhere.

    The content is organized into packs. You get three free starter packs right out of the gate — Around the House, Kitchen Essentials, and Bathroom Basics. That’s about 50 objects your kid can explore without paying anything. If they (or you) want more, there are twelve expansion packs covering everything from Animals and Food to Numbers, Colors, Body Parts, Actions, and even Weather. Each pack is $0.99, or you can grab the whole bundle for $2.99.

    And here’s the part I’m probably most proud of: it doesn’t just do three languages. It does eight. English, Romanian, Vietnamese, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Korean. You pick which languages you want to display in the settings, and only those show up as buttons. So if your family is Franco-German, you configure it for French and German. If you’re a Korean family living in Spain, you set it to Korean and Spanish. The app adapts to your family’s actual linguistic landscape.

    Simple UI Is The Best UI

    The UI stays true to the original insight — it still mimics the two-panel layout that my son had already mastered from YouTube. On iPad, you get a split view: the object image takes up the left two-thirds of the screen, and the scrollable list of items sits on the right. On iPhone, it stacks vertically. Big touch targets everywhere — we’re talking 60 to 80 points minimum — because toddler fingers are not exactly precision instruments.

    I also added a parental gate, because App Store requires it for kids’ apps, and honestly, it makes sense. Before any purchase or external link, there’s a simple math challenge (something like “15 + 23 = ?”) that a toddler definitely can’t solve. It keeps the experience safe and gives parents control.

    One thing I deliberately left out: gamification. No stars, no streaks, no “you did it!” pop-ups. The reward IS the interaction. Tap a button, hear a word. That’s it. Kids don’t need to be tricked into learning — they just need the right tool at the right moment.

    Now it’s live on the App Store with 8 integrated languages, 15 content packs, and over 300 vocabulary items. Instead of watching only cartoons, our son is also actively exploring words in multiple languages, building vocabulary at his own pace, driven by the same swipe-and-tap patterns that YouTube accidentally taught him.

    Sometimes the best product ideas don’t come from market research or competitor analysis. They come from sitting on the couch, watching a one-year-old accidentally subscribe to a Cars on the Road channel, and thinking: “There has to be a better use for this skill.”

    P.S. That’s not my first attempt to solve real-life problems by coding. Stay tuned, there might be another story about how I won against Mekong Delta mosquitoes soon…

    If you want to test it, you can download it for free from here: https://apps.apple.com/pt/app/ai-kiddo/id6758517566?l=en-GB

    [ad_2]

    dragos@dragosroua.com (Dragos Roua)

    Source link

  • Can You Stay Relevant After 50, In The Age of AI? – Dragos Roua

    [ad_1]

    Spoiler: you can. You already are.

    Traditionally, old age was always a mark of wisdom, or at least useful experience. Something has changed, though, and, if you are over 50, chances are that your career is considered done in many Western countries. Add to this the systemic shift of AI, and you get a pretty grim picture.

    It’s 3 AM somewhere on the northern shore of Lake Balaton. I’m at kilometer 170 of a 222-kilometer race, and I’m not sure I can finish. The summer rain has stopped and the road is cutting through wet cornfields. I have the eerie feeling that my steps don’t make any sound: my soles are raw—blisters the size of my fist, already burst. Every single step sends brutal pain up my spine.

    I stopped running a few hours ago. Now I’m walking, alternating 30-second running sessions with 5-minute walking sessions, anchoring myself to the reflective vest of the runner ahead of me – disappearing and reappearing in the dark fog. The math is unforgiving: 52 kilometers left, less than eight hours until the cutoff. Normally, I would finish this with a smile on my face (even including a nap break, honestly), but now, after 170 painful kilometers and 24 hours of continuous effort, my body screams to sit down. My mind wants a reason to continue.

    So I made a deal with myself. Don’t think about the finish line. Just get to the next aid station. It’s 8 kilometers away. That’s all. Crawl if you have to, but keep moving until you see the lights. Then, when you get there, make the same deal again.

    I finished UltraBalaton that day. Not super fast, not in good shape—but finished. And something from that night stayed with me, became a kind of operating system for life: you don’t need to see the end. You just need to see the next checkpoint.

    I think about that race often now. The world feels similar—dark, foggy, uncertain, hard to see what’s ahead. AI has arrived not as a gradual shift but as a systemic change, the kind that reshapes our world in months instead of decades. If you’re over 50, you’ve probably felt the question poking relentlessly: Am I still relevant? Can I keep up? Is there a place for me in what comes next?

    Here’s what I’ve learned. After 50, you hold three assets that only compound with time—and none of them can be automated.

    1. Experience Still Matters

    We’ve seen the dot-com go bust. We’ve seen Lehman Brothers crash and witnessed the rise of the crypto world. Then saw NFTs crashing to the ground. When you’ve watched trends die so many times, you develop a quiet instinct for what lasts. You don’t need to chase every new thing—because you’ve earned the right to ask better questions first. Does this solve a real problem? Will it matter in five years? This pattern recognition isn’t nostalgia. It’s sane judgment. And sane judgment is what people pay for when the hype fades. And this AI hype will fade too.

    2. Ethics Is Irreplaceable

    When you’re younger, you look at integrity as something that drags you down. You watch how everyone else seems to be cutting corners and getting ahead. But corners catch up, eventually. They always do. By 50, you’ve seen hundreds of reputations traded for speed and watched the repayment come due. You’ve also learned that trust takes years to build and seconds to lose. In a world flooded with AI-generated content and shortcuts, being the person others can rely on, no matter what – well, that isn’t old-fashioned, it’s rare. Rare is valuable.

    3. Mindset Outlasts Everything

    That night in Hungary taught me something no business workshop ever could: keep moving until the next aid station. Not forever—just until the next checkpoint. This is the mindset that gets you through uncertain years, difficult projects, the long middle stretches when nobody’s clapping. AI can work faster than you, that’s true. But it can’t decide when to push through and when to rest. It doesn’t know that most people quit in the third hour after midnight – and the ones who don’t are the ones who finish.

    I sold my first company at 38. I thought I was clever – and for a while, I was. But then I watched almost all of the money disappear into bad timing and lessons I hadn’t learned yet. So I had to start over. I had to accept the chapter was closed entirely – and it was up to me, and only me, to start writing the next one. To move to the next checkpoint. Crawl if I had to, but move forward.

    The world keeps telling you that 30 is the new 50, then that 50 is obsolete. Ignore it.

    AI is just a tool. A remarkable one—I use it daily. But it doesn’t have scar tissue on its soles. It doesn’t remember pushing through at 3AM through wet cornfields. It doesn’t carry the crushing weight of a lesson learned the hard way.

    We’ve survived dial-up internet, the 2008 crash, and the whole cryptocurrency ups and downs. We’re still here. That’s not a disadvantage. That’s a hard-earned place at the table.

    Pack light. Move first. Finish the loop.

    The lake is still there. You got this.

    [ad_2]

    dragos@dragosroua.com (Dragos Roua)

    Source link