The challenge: Getting tech-savvy kids interested in reading books.

One solution: Novel Effect

Good stories have always had the ability to captivate—to hold our hearts and imaginations—but today, books often lose out to flashier forms of entertainment. In an effort to make reading engaging for children, Melissa and Matt Hammersley developed the Novel Effect app for IOs, available for download in the Apple Store.

Novel Effect was featured on Shark Tank last fall. The company has won a Webby Award for the Novel Effect app and are now working with the Alexa Accelerator program to develop the growth of this voice-enabled storytelling platform. The Novel Effect app uses voice recognition technology to automatically add music and sounds to the book reading experience.

Novel Effect’s offering is built around children’s books. The company has created sound effects and other audio integrations for dozens of kids’ books, which get triggered when someone reads the books aloud. More than 150 audio “soundscapes” are available for free if a user owns a print book; these soundscapes can also run in the background with ebooks.

You can watch this video to get an idea of how this app works with reading a book:

Not surprisingly, the books that Novel Effect has created “soundscapes” for are all general market books. Hopefully, they will add Christian-themed books soon, or maybe someone else will come up with a similar app for Christian books for kids.

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