The story

alcoia isn't built to compete with text-to-speech tools or reading-assistance software. Those are mature categories with real, useful products already in them. It's built against a newer habit: pasting a page into a chatbot, reading the answer instead of the source, and calling that reading.

That habit is quietly expensive. It produces something that feels like understanding without the part that makes understanding stick: you have to recall it, not just see a summary. Reading researchers have known this for decades. It just hasn't been built into anything that watches you read in real time and intervenes only when it matters.

So Alcoïa does one thing. It watches how you move through a page. No camera, no account, no permission prompt. When something doesn't stick, it asks a short question about the sentence itself. Get it right, it gets out of the way. Get it wrong, it shows you what was right. Everything else (the receipt, the vocabulary review, the accessibility tools) sits around that one loop.

The client that runs in your browser is open source under AGPL-3.0. A product that tracks reading should be auditable by anyone who wants to look. What that means →