Sahaj

MotherTongue Books makes original, illustrated children's picture books written natively in a child's own language, not translated from English, and checked by native speakers before anyone can read them. Hundreds of millions of children speak one language at home but find almost no picture books in it. A parent in Belagavi looking for a Kannada bedtime story, or one in Durban looking for isiZulu, comes back nearly empty-handed, and machine-translated English books read stiffly. Children learn to read best in their mother tongue (UNESCO estimates about 40% of people don't get an education in a language they understand). A parent or teacher picks a language, the child's age, and an idea, a folk tale their family knows, or their own story in their own words. A team of agents built on Meta's models then plans the story, writes it directly in the language, checks the reading level and child safety (sending it back for rewrites), illustrates every page, checks each picture and redraws bad ones, makes objects in the pictures tappable to hear and learn the word, and reads every page aloud. The book stays a private draft until the adult reviews it; "Fix a word" corrects a word everywhere and teaches the writer for future books. It is live now with 27 published books in 8 languages: Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Swahili, Nepali, isiZulu, Haitian Creole and Basque, every one checked by a native reader. The reader works on phones and in any browser, books save as printable PDFs for schools without internet, share links show the book's cover, and the website itself is available in Kannada, Telugu, Marathi and English. Adding a language takes a few lines of code. Everything in the repository and shown in the demo was built during the hackathon (Oct 26 – Nov 4, 2026). Live: https://mothertongue-books.vercel.app