This paper describes IBM’s automatic reading tutor system, the Reading Companion. The reading tutor aims to improve the literacy skills of beginning readers, both children and adults, and help adults who are non-native speakers of English to learn the language. We describe Reading Companion’s architecture, which allows a large, globally distributed reading companion community to create and share new reading material. We also report substantial accuracy improvements in recognizing children’s speech gained by training the recognizer on the IBM Kidspeak corpus, a newly developed corpus of children’s speech.