Well, it's describing the iPad... with off-shored real-time tutoring providing most of the value. Even for the niche that can afford that (which should be larger than the niche that can afford in-person tutoring), I'm not aware of any services.
Well, to nitpick, that aspect of the primer was to demonstrate that there are some things, specifically human voices, that were hard to automate. The "tutor" made absolutely no teaching decisions whatsoever was instructed what to say. They only provided a voice. This was a crucial point in the story. So I'd say the educational aspect was entirely automated. Most of the value was provided by the primer itself. If a machine could've provided the voice, all aspects of the relationship with the book would have been directly with it.
> Most of the value was provided by the primer itself.
That's not what I took away from it. Of the three girls initially tutored by the Primer, for one the reading was done by many different actresses while for the other it was done by her father in a dreamlike mid-coital state. Neither of these two turned out the queen of all they surveyed the way Nell did. My take away was that what mattered was the human connection, that there had to be an adult who cared what happened even if she didn't have much ability to help, that gave the protagonist the strength to do what she did in the end.
> with off-shored real-time tutoring providing most of the value
Yes, a critical part of the Illustrated Primer was that it was paired with real-time tutoring by a remote human, and turned out to be most effective when the remote human was regularly the same person who cared for the child on the other end.
> it was paired with real-time tutoring by a remote human
That is not really true. The remote human only provided the voice. Miranda the character who ended up reading up the lines for Nell most definietly had no input into the direction the fictional story she read up had, nor she had the sophistication or the situational awerness to be considered the tutor.
The fictional technology has this strange twist that the AI in question can do the hard job of individualised training and emotional support, but can’t do local voice synthesis.
Just an example of what I mean to those who didn’t read the book: The fictional AI tutoring technology was manufactured for the educated grand-daughter of the CEO of a tech company. A copy of this AI gets to a poor, illiterate young girl who is physically abused by his step father. The AI manages to deduce this situation on its own and adapts to the changed circumstances (a situation which is lightyears away from the one it was developed for). It starts to teach the girl to read while also teaching her elementary martial art and survival skills. The AI on its own also decides when it is time for the girl to run and escape from the troubled home, knows how to evade security drones and etc. These are all conveyed through story beats in the fictional story read up to the girl by a remote actress true, but the remote actress (Miranda) is just a passive voice. In fact she suspects through the lines she has to read up that there is a girl somewhere out there who is in trouble, but she doesn’t know anything about her or how to even find her.
So no, in short this is nothing like “remote tutoring” as one would understand that.
But, returning to the subject of the article, this is interesting.
Among my peers in the U.S. right now (upper middle class, tech heavy), live-in nannies and full time tutors are unheard of, as the article says. But friends who have families in lower labor cost areas (Mexico, Thailand) often do still have live-in help. Even though they're no higher on the relative income ladder in their countries than I am, the floor cost of labor is so much lower that this is still a reasonable -- and quite common -- option.
Meanwhile, early education is (to my extremely limited knowledge) not an area where one-on-one off-shoring facilitated by technology has really been explored. Seems like an interesting space.
Full time tutors would have been an interesting solution to schooling, in the pandemic. Totally and utterly unscalable of course, but still kind of interesting.
The only part that was off-shored was the voice, because apparently a computer couldn’t simulate one well enough. The voice actors just read from the provided script and didn’t change anything.
