For Her Cousin, Then For Thousands: Vidushee Shekhar And The Making Of Sambhav

Vidushee's journey began close to home. Her younger cousin, who lives in Bihar, has dyslexia and had access to little or no specialist support. In much of India, children with learning difficulties outside major cities face the same gap. Living far away in Bengaluru, Vidushee wanted to find a way to help.

That wish became Sambhav, named after the Hindi word for "possible". It began as a reading app for children with dyslexia, and Vidushee built it alongside her schoolwork.

From A Project To A Research Question

Building the app led Vidushee to a question she could not answer with code alone: could speech technology built around adult voices fairly judge a child reading aloud? Rather than assume the answer, she set out to test it. She trained four speech recognition models on adult speech, tested them on children, and compared how well each could spot reading errors. The answer shaped both her paper and the app.

The work became a research paper on detecting reading errors in children's speech. She presented it at APSIPA ASC 2026, an international conference on signal and information processing, and it is set to appear in IEEE Xplore. She also presented her work at CHIRA, an international conference on computer-human interaction research.

In 2026, the paper won her the Sigma Xi Interdisciplinary Award in the Tools for Science, Education track. Sigma Xi is an international honour society for scientific research, and Vidushee was one of only ten winners worldwide.

Learning From Setbacks

Not every step went smoothly. Early testing showed that children could be marked down for how they spoke rather than for the reading difficulties Sambhav was meant to catch. Vidushee went back to the design, reworked the practice material and refined how the app assessed reading. The findings from her research fed directly back into Sambhav, strengthening it further.

Beyond The Original Idea

What started as an app for one kind of learner has grown well beyond it. Sambhav is now a reading and speaking coach for children learning English. It is used by more than 15,000 children through two community education organisations in Delhi, and runs daily at three of their centres. Vidushee built and supported it from Bengaluru, far from the classrooms where it is used.

Vidushee built Sambhav with her cousin in mind, but "it has really grown to be a beast of its own," she says. "I did not realise that it could be so radical."

She is Sambhav's founder and lead developer, and a patent application for the platform has been published.

The work has changed her too. "It has also become my way of bonding with kids much younger than me in a way I have never had before," she says. "It feels like I have gained a whole bunch of younger siblings through this app."

Now in her final year of school, Vidushee continues to develop Sambhav. A project that began with one cousin has given her published research, an international award, a patent filing and an app used every day in classrooms far from home. For a student who has not yet finished school, it is a rare combination of research and real-world impact.