My Kid Reads Chinese. I Don’t. So I Built an AI Teaching Assistant.
Our kid reads their Chinese homework aloud in the car after school. I can’t follow along while driving, so I built a free Claude skill that checks the recording against photos of the pages.
Homework falls to my wife at night, when everyone’s tired. My shift is school pickup. Our kid is still fresh then, so they read the day’s Chinese pages aloud in the car.
The catch is that I’m driving, so I can’t follow along in the book. So we record it, and Claude checks it.
A real review page. Turn the sound on to hear the recording and the model reading.
What you get back
Give Claude the recording and a photo of each page. It sends back a review page with:
- A score for each page, plus characters per minute.
- Each mistake marked on the page photo. Tap one to hear that moment of the recording.
- The right reading, with pinyin, English and a model reading you can play.
- Skipped lines, marked.
- Spots where Claude isn’t sure, flagged as “Maybe”. You decide whether they count, and the score updates.
Install it
In the Claude app (web, desktop or mobile):
- Download chinese-reading-check.zip.
- In Settings > Capabilities, turn on Code execution and file creation.
- In the Skills section, click +, then Create skill > Upload a skill, and pick the zip.
- In a new chat, attach the recording and a photo of each page, and ask Claude to check the reading.
The first run takes a few extra minutes while the speech models download.
In Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add frictionlesscode/claude-plugins/plugin install chinese-reading-check@frictionlesscodeThe source is in frictionlesscode/claude-plugins.
Turns out I make a decent teaching assistant.