In her three decades of practice as a clinical linguist, Coral PS Hoh became especially moved by the experiences of kids with dyslexia. “Working directly with children and seeing how much they had to struggle at school and how very painful it was for the entire family, I, and my team, thought that if we have the ability to solve this problem, we have a responsibility to do it,” she says. Their solution is a gamified generative AI platform called Dysolve AI, produced under the umbrella of ed tech and academic consultancy firm EduNational LLC, where Hoh is founder and CEO.
The overarching idea, Hoh notes, is that Dysolve improves brain processing to make reading easier. The program uses computing technology to identify the unique inefficiencies in a student’s linguistic system and then generates individualized games and tasks to target the problem. Hoh describes the process as similar to finding and correcting errors in the code of a computer’s operating system. “If you can address each piece of a processing difficulty that a child has, then logically, you should be able to correct the condition. That’s what we’ve found,” she says.
In a typical scenario, monthly subscribers log into their account and play customized interactive verbal games for about 15 minutes a day. “It works because of its generative capability,” Hoh says of Dysolve. “For each session, each game that a student engages with is generated in real time during that interaction. And it’s only used once, then it disappears.” During gameplay, the program analyzes a student’s responses and immediately creates new games to correct any inefficiencies it detects. “We call them inefficiencies because that is something you can then change and monitor and measure,” Hoh says. “What we have done, really, with the dyslexia problem is define it in a way that you can operationalize it and measure it so that you know if you are correcting it, first of all, and then when it is corrected, you see that the numbers inside the server have changed for that individual.”
But does it really work? Hoh says that the team is looking at two different kinds of evidence to determine the quality of the impact of Dysolve. First is a series of case studies. “For example,” Hoh posits, “can we get somebody who is functioning below the 25th percentile in state or standardized testing to the 50th percentile or above? Yes. Case by case we’ve seen that happen for the past eight years.”
To measure the average impact of the program, Hoh says that Dysolve is the subject of a clinical trial designed and conducted independently by the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy at the University of Delaware, following more than 750 students in 28 schools. The study launched in 2022 and ends with the close of the 2025 school year. “Preliminary results are showing positive effects in a very diverse population,” she says.
Families comprise the bulk of subscribers in 38 states, and they can choose from a range of memberships beginning at the basic level, listed for a promotional price of $100 per month. In 2023, Dysolve began offering a version of the platform for schools with a similar average price of $1,000 per pupil for the 10-month school year. “If we really want to deliver the solution to dyslexia to as many people as possible, then the public school system is the way to do it,” Hoh says. “It’s worse than just a reading crisis,” she adds. “Before Covid, there was already a reading crisis, but now it’s an economic crisis as well. Can schools continue to do things the old way, where you just keep students struggling year after year? They’re running out of resources because there’s a shortage of teachers, especially in special education.”
Hoh points out that Dysolve can offer schools a solution that’s cost-effective in the long run, in contrast to the amount of manual work typically required of special ed teachers working with struggling readers via intervention programs. “What technology can do is remove the friction in the system,” she says. On average, according to Hoh, students using Dysolve reach their grade level in reading in one to two years.
Next on Hoh’s agenda is to generate even more awareness of the Dysolve platform. “We want to be able to resolve this problem for the schools, for all the individuals in the school system, and to get it to the children as quickly as possible,” she says. “Because we saw, back when we were developing the product, on a family-by-family basis, how painful dyslexia is.”
