MUNICH, Germany | February 9, 2026] — eKidz today announced it has been recognized by the Global EdTech Startup Awards (GESAwards) Prize for its AI powered, child-specific speech recognition technology that helps children around the world develop foundational literacy skills through safe, voice-based learning and assessment experiences.
Built specifically for young learners, eKidz’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) platform is designed to perform in real-world learning environments where general voice systems often fail. It recognizes children’s speech with phoneme-level precision, handles classroom-grade background noise, and supports diverse accents, dialects, code-switching, and disability-related speech patterns.
“Voice is becoming a primary interface for learning, and kids deserve technology that is built for them,” said Nataliya Tetruyeva, CEO at eKidz. “The GESAwards recognition reinforces our focus on ensuring every child is accurately understood and supported, especially multilingual learners and students with learning differences.”
“eKidz exemplifies what meaningful AI in education should look like: technology that is purpose-built for children, grounded in research, and tested in real classrooms. Their child-specific speech recognition addresses one of the hardest challenges in literacy development: ensuring every child is truly heard,” said Avi Warshavsky, Founder of the Global EdTech Startup Awards (GESAwards) and CEO of MindCET.
eKidz’s ASR platform is used by over 300,000 students across classrooms and homes in the United States and Europe, with additional large-scale impact work across Latin America and other emerging markets. In Europe, eKidz has a strong footprint, including deployments in Germany and Luxembourg, and in Latin America the company is advancing major initiatives in Colombia with additional programs in development across the region.
To accelerate impact beyond its own products, eKidz is pursuing a licensing and partnership strategy that makes its child-specific ASR technology accessible to education companies across the literacy ecosystem. By offering specialized ASR models for children through APIs and tailored licensing frameworks, eKidz enables curriculum providers, assessment organizations, and EdTech innovators to integrate safe, high-quality voice recognition without building it from scratch. This approach lowers barriers to innovation, supports interoperability, and helps ensure that voice-based learning and assessment tools for children are inclusive by design, not limited to a single platform. The first pilot integrations are already underway, marking an important step toward a more connected and equitable literacy ecosystem. “eKidz is tackling one of the most difficult problems in educational AI: generating trustworthy evidence from children’s speech at scale. Their child-specific ASR sets a new bar for how voice technologies can support both learning and assessment—interoperable, inclusive, and grounded in how language development truly works across multilingual and diverse learners. This is the kind of foundational technology the literacy ecosystem needs,” said Alina von Davier, Senior Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University - Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics, Advisor to eKdz.
eKidz’s platform is built with a kid-safe approach that prioritizes privacy, reliability, and responsible use in educational settings. The company’s development process emphasizes safeguards, developmentally appropriate interaction design, and alignment to real classroom needs shaped through pilots and educator collaboration.
eKidz builds a kid-safe conversational platform powered by inclusive, child-specific speech recognition and guardrail AI. Its technology recognizes diverse accents, dialects, code-switching, and disability-related speech patterns, enabling equitable coaching experiences across reading, writing, and learning.
Nataliya (Natasha) Tetruyeva
Co-Founder and CEO eKidz
nataliya.tetruyeva@ekidz.eu
0049 17672811809
www.ekidz.eu