Alpaca — AI-Powered Early Dyslexia Screening for Irish Primary Schools

Alpaca (Assessing Letter Knowledge and Phonemic Awareness Classroom Application) is an AI-enabled dyslexia-screening game for children as young as four, developed by Early Intervention Tools — a spin-out of Trinity College Dublin's Learnovate Centre — with the Marino Institute of Education and Trinity's School of Education.

Children play a 20-minute game featuring 'Archie the alpaca' on a tablet with headphones; the system runs automatically and can screen six children at once without adding to teachers' workload, aiming to flag early risk of dyslexia and reading difficulty years before children can read print.

The project received a €330,000 award under Enterprise Ireland's Research Commercialisation Fund in early 2022 and was piloted with 1,000 junior-infant children across 30 schools in five countries. By the 2023-24 school year Alpaca had screened more than 25,000 children across six countries, with a target of 30,000 Irish children in 2024-25 and a stated goal of one million children screened annually worldwide by 2028; the company was also raising a further €1.5 million funding round. Public reporting describes teacher and school feedback as 'overwhelmingly positive'.

No controlled study measuring whether Alpaca-flagged children go on to receive earlier intervention or achieve better literacy outcomes than unscreened peers has been published; the evidence to date concerns deployment scale and process, not causal learning impact.