Hi Product Hunt. I'm Elina, and this is my second launch. 🐱

Yomi is a little cat who loves being read to. Kids read stories out loud, Yomi listens (speech recognition), and every word feeds the cat a little. Tomorrow Yomi is hungry again.

I'm a designer, and I've spent years building educational tools with teachers. In a workshop with first- and second-grade teachers, one question kept coming back: why do some kids freeze when asked to read aloud, even when they can read just fine on their own? A few months later my own kid was doing exactly that, reading silently, refusing to read aloud to anyone. I didn't want to force it. I wanted to build her somewhere safe to practise.

The apps I tried first made it worse, not better: streaks that made bedtime stressful, fire emojis that made her feel bad for taking a day off.

So Yomi deliberately has:

– no streaks (nobody should lose a 14-day streak at bedtime)
– no ads
– no accounts, no data collection
– no leaderboards, no coins, no levels for the kid, only the cat, who is happy today because you read to it

To be honest about what it is: Yomi won't teach your kid to read. Teachers and parents do that. Yomi just gives kids a reason to want the practice, real stories at three levels, tap a word to hear it, and a little wizard for making up your own stories to read back.

It's on iOS in English and Finnish. I'd love to hear from parents here: what made reading practice work (or not work) at your house?

Yomi

A little cat who loves being read to

A little cat who loves being read to