About

A long, stubborn attempt to get Indian kids to fall in love with the alphabet of their mother tongue. If you are a parent, grandparent, or teacher trying to pass on a language that English keeps elbowing out - we built this for you.

An APP ten years in the making.

We started COOLPHABETS in 2016 with a single mission: somehow convince Indian kids to read and write the alphabet of their mother tongue. We knew that wasn't going to happen by handing them another textbook.

2016 — The alphabet on everyday things

So we designed a few sets of alphabet charts in major Indian languages and printed them on everyday household objects - mugs, bedsheets, t-shirts. The hypothesis: "A child surrounded by such objects passively imbibes the alphabet in a stress-free way. Learning doesn't happen instantly, but whatever is learnt is retained for a lifetime."

We made a few sales. Nothing significant. None of our outreach programmes worked. The whole thing had the vibe of an e-commerce project - it just didn't click. A tiny fraction of parents loved it and placed repeat orders for birthday return gifts. Meaningful for them, not enough for us.

2017 — Cool Slate, and the wall we hit

In late 2017 we started on an app called Cool Slate. Kids could trace each letter and hear how it sounded. After a year of effort, the app was bad - to put it mildly. The trace recognition was poor. The speech was monotonous and robotic. We didn't have the time or money to keep building the core tech. We got burnt. We pulled the plug.

A while later we shut the company down. The annual accounting and filings were a burden.

The years in between

But the brand COOLPHABETS survived. We let the website run (minus the shopping cart). Every so often an old customer would email us - "Hey, we need 20 mugs for a birthday party. How do we place an order?"

All the while we were sure of one thing. There was a real, strong urge among parents to have their kids learn to read and write in their mother tongue. We knew families were spending at least $1,000 a year per child on language schools. To the kids, it was a chore - another subject to master after school.

2026 - The tech finally caught up

By the time we revisited the idea, the tech had matured. The two things that had killed Cool Slate - 'handwriting recognition' that actually worked, and 'natural sounding Indian language voices' - were finally solvable. And solvable on-device, not as cloud round-trips that would break the moment a family stepped onto a flight.

Offline isn't a fallback for us - it's the design. Every letter, word, sentence, voice, game, and AI score lives on your child's device. Practice on a road trip, at a grandparent's home with patchy Wi-Fi, on a 12-hour flight - none of it skips a beat. We've never wanted a five-year-old's learning streak to depend on a router somewhere.

Custom trained handwriting-recognition models

Behind it: our own handwriting-recognition models, trained from scratch for each Indian script we support. Telugu's curves, Devanagari's headlines, Tamil's loops - each script gets a model tuned to its actual letter shapes, not a generic recogniser trying to be everything. Those models ship inside the app, encrypted, and they only ever see strokes your child draws - never a server.

So we started over. New foundation, new code, new everything. After nearly a decade - plus three weeks of App Store bureaucracy - the COOLPHABETS apps are live.

Where we're going

We aim to support all Indian languages. Each language gets the same treatment - native voices, real cultural content, and on-device handwriting recognition tuned for the script's specific letter shapes.

Tell us which language matters most for your family. The order we ship in is driven by what families ask for.

Who we are

COOLPHABETS is built and run by Venkat and Ranjit - friends since 2nd grade. We've spent the last decade on this idea - through a first venture, a shutdown, and this rebuild.

The app for learning Indian languages.

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