Everything else is built on reading: work, health, rights, the internet itself.
Most ten-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries cannot read a simple text. For all of history, a patient personal teacher was a luxury for the few. AI is about to make it almost free. The real question is who it gets built for first.
The State of Global Learning Poverty, World Bank, UNESCO and partners, 2022
We decided to start with the learners no one builds for, in one of the hardest places we could find.
Chico Curumim is a Huni Kuin village on the Rio Jordão, in the Brazilian Amazon. Portuguese is not the learners’ first language. Hãtxa Kuin is. A family shares one phone. The internet comes from a satellite. If a tutor works here, it can work almost anywhere.
Lessons are in Portuguese, the school language. Speakers from the village recorded the instructions in Hãtxa Kuin. Before the first lesson, we checked 17 young people on paper. Five knew their letters but could not read a single syllable. That is where we start.
Ya Ka and Tereza Celbová, Chico Curumim. English subtitles.
nuiki talks with each learner for ten minutes a day, at exactly their level, starting from their own life.
It listens
The tutor talks with the learner by voice, in Portuguese, on the phone the family shares.
It meets them where they are
It finds out what each learner can already do, and starts there.
It writes their book
Every lesson becomes a chapter of the learner’s own book: a short story from their day, words made only of letters they already know, their handwriting and a sum.
Code keeps it honest
The language model talks. Code decides what the learner is shown and what counts as read.
8 learners 33 lessons
Pilot since 23 October 2026, numbers as of 2 November 2026.
We have been running since 23 October. We don’t have learning gains yet. We will measure them honestly: on words the tutor never taught, scored by a person, not by the tutor. The first re-check comes next.
We are not teachers. That is why we need one.
We are looking for an experienced literacy teacher to tell us where we are wrong: how the tutor should teach, and how to know that someone really learned to read, not just learned to use the app. You would have a real say, including the power to stop what does not work.
Tereza Celbová
CEO
Kryštof Celba
CTO
We are twins. Tereza knows the community and runs the work in the field. Kryštof builds everything. We are building nuiki as a company, for literacy programmes and the institutions that fund them.
The long-term goal is the Primer from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: a tutor that knows you, tells stories where you are the hero, and teaches you in your own language.
We think it can be built. We are starting with one village.
If you teach literacy, work on education in Brazil or invest early, we would like to hear from you.
[email protected]