yondly.

Pre-K to 2nd grade · In prototype

Paper in.
Voice out.

Yondly is a tutor that never hands your child a screen. An ordinary pencil, ordinary paper, and a clipboard that can read the page. It follows the work and answers out loud.

Grade 2 · Multiplication Sheet 04
7 × 6 = 42
9 × 4 = 36

“The first one's right. On the second, you've got one group too many — count them again with me.”

Spoken aloud · 1.4s later

Yondly never marks the page. It only talks.

How it works

Three steps, and only one of them belongs to your child.

Step 1

You set the work

Pick the subject and the level from your phone. Print the sheet on whatever printer you own — or just clip in the homework the school already sent home.

Step 2

They write it, or read it

The pencil from their bag, on the clipboard, at the kitchen table. Nothing to log into, nothing lighting up, nothing to swipe away from.

Step 3

Yondly answers

It follows along as they work and responds out loud — a nudge when they're stuck, a question back when they're close. Then it tells you what happened.

The clipboard

Yes, there's a camera. It can only ever see the clipboard.

The lens is fixed in the clip, pointed down at the board, focused at the distance of the page. It cannot be aimed anywhere else without taking the thing apart. But the stronger promise is what happens to the picture after that — because almost none of it survives the first second.

01 · on the clipboard
38
+24
discarded

The frame is cropped to the board. Corner markers on the clipboard define the page. Everything outside that rectangle is thrown away in the same pass that finds it.

02 · on the clipboard
38
+24
62
1-bit, no colour

What's left is reduced to graphite. Flattened, then dropped to black-and-white marks on white paper. Colour, shadow, skin, and texture do not survive the conversion.

03 · leaves the house
sheet: mult-04
q:     "38 + 24"
wrote: "62"
state: correct
redo:  1
the whole payload

Only the reading goes to the cloud. What was on the page and what your child wrote — as text. There is no photograph at the other end of this, because none is sent.

If it can't find the clipboard, it sends nothing. There is no fallback that uploads a raw frame.

The light is wired to the sensor. Not to software. It cannot read the page without showing you that it is.

You can see every payload. The parent app shows exactly what left the house, session by session, in plain text.

Hands are the honest exception. Fingers resting on the page are inside the crop. We won't claim it only sees paper — it only sees the board.

Reading aloud

It knows which book is open, and listens while they read it.

Your child reads from a real book. Yondly follows the words, and when they stall on one, it helps — right then, without stopping the story or making them start the page over. Afterwards, you get the parts worth talking about at dinner.

The Fox on Hollow Lane · p. 14 Reading · 6 min

The fox crept along the low stone wall, quiet as snow.

“That one's tricky. Try it in two pieces — creep, then a t on the end.”

Spoken aloud · after a 3s pause

One tutor, several years

It starts before they can read, and keeps going.

The clipboard doesn't change as your child grows — the work on it does. Same pencil, same books, same voice beside them.

Pre-K

Letter sounds, counting real objects, tracing, holding a pencil properly. Mostly listening and answering back.

Planned

Kindergarten & 1st

Sight words, reading aloud a page at a time, number bonds, first written sentences.

Prototyping now

2nd grade and up

Fluency and comprehension, multiplication and division, paragraphs, spelling that sticks.

Prototyping now

After that

Whatever they're working on that can be done with a pencil and a book. That's the whole constraint.

The plan, not a promise

Deliberately missing

The parts we left out are the product.

Most learning tools earn attention and then try to make it productive. Yondly is built the other way around: we removed everything that competes for a child's eyes, and kept only the part that teaches.

  • No screen for your child

    Yondly has no display facing them at all. Their eyes stay on the paper, because there's nowhere else for them to go.

  • No camera that sees the room

    The lens is fixed in the clip, aimed at the board, and the frame is cropped to the page before anything else runs.

  • No special pen

    Whatever pencil is in their bag. Nothing to charge, nothing to lose, nothing to replace at fifty dollars a time.

  • No streaks, points, or feed

    Nothing to farm, nothing to lose by stopping. When the worksheet is finished, it's finished.

  • No child account

    The parent app is the only account. You choose the work, you hear how it went, and the record stops with you.

  • No always-on anything

    Camera and microphone run during a session you started, and not otherwise. Recordings are yours to keep or delete.

Where this actually is

Honest status: prototype, not product.

We're not taking money and we're not promising a ship date. Here's the shape of the thing we're building and what's still open.

The clipboard
A fixed camera in the clip, a speaker, a microphone, and nothing else. Working in prototype on off-the-shelf parts. Enclosure not designed yet.
On-device crop
Corner markers, flatten, crop, reduce to 1-bit — all on the board, before anything is sent. Running. The open question is how it behaves in bad kitchen light.
Reading the writing
Digits and arithmetic layout are handled well. Messy handwriting on free-form sentences is where it still struggles, and where more of the work is going.
Reading aloud
Yondly matches what it hears against the text of the book, so it knows where they are on the page. Earliest stage of the three. Works on a small set of titles so far.
Parent app
Set the work, hear what happened, see what was sent, adjust tomorrow. Design in progress.
What we need
Families with a 3–8 year old who'd try an early version and tell us the truth about it. That's what the waitlist is for.

If this is the tutor you'd want in your house, say so early.

Early families shape what gets built — which subjects come first, what the voice sounds like, how much the parent app should tell you.