A long, stubborn attempt to get Indian kids to fall in love with the alphabet of their mother tongue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 recognizer 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 iPhone app is live. Android is coming soon.
Children learn faster when they hear someone they love. We let parents record their own voice for every letter and word — and the app uses that instead.
Once installed, everything runs without the internet. Voices, games, AI scoring, progress — all on the device. Road trips and patchy Wi-Fi at grandparents' don't break the streak.
Handwriting recognition runs on models we trained ourselves, one per script. They ship encrypted inside the app, run only on your child's device, and never send a stroke to a server.
No ads, no tracking, no third-party SDKs collecting your child's data. COPPA-compliant by design, not by disclosure.
Mini-stories about a crow, an autorickshaw, an Aaji making chai. Drawn from familiar life, not lifted from English curricula.
One subscription, multiple child profiles. Family Sharing reaches grandparents at no extra cost — because three generations learning together is the point.
Today: Telugu, Hindi, and Marathi. Next: every major Indian language. Each one 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.
Coolphabets is built and run by Venkat and Ranjit. They've spent the last decade on this idea — through a first venture, a shutdown, and a rebuild — and have been friends since 2nd grade.
If you're a parent, grandparent, or teacher trying to pass on a language that English keeps elbowing out — we built this for you.
Thank you for trusting us with a few minutes of your child's day. After ten years of trying, we don't take that lightly.