Google’s '‘Socratic’' Learning App Now Uses AI to Help High School, College Students

Google has announced that a mobile learning app called ‘Socratic’ that it acquired last year, now uses AI to help high school and university students when they’re doing schoolwork outside the classroom. “It guides them through the resources that are available, and identifies the core underlying concepts that will lead them to answers to their questions”, the company said on its official blog.

According to Google, the app is the result of its efforts at building educational resources for students and addressing the challenges they face while studying by themselves. “We’ve heard that students often get ‘stuck’ while studying. When they have questions in the classroom, a teacher can quickly clarify—but it’s frustrating for students who spend hours trying to find answers while studying on their own”, the company said.

To address the problem, Google says it worked with educators to create subject guides on over 1,000 higher education and high school topics, including, but not limited to, science, math, English, social studies and more. The app allows students to look up any topic they need to brush up on, get the key points, and then go deeper with helpful resources on the web.

Users can get help by taking a photo of a question or use their voice to ask a question, whereupon, the app will find the most relevant resources from across the web. Students will also be able to check out alternative explanations of certain concepts by simply taking a picture of a page they are struggling to understand.

Google claims that the new features are the result of its latest AI-based algorithms that can now look at a student’s question and automatically identify the relevant underlying concepts. “From there, we can find the videos, concept explanations, and online resources to help them work through their questions”, the company said.

Socratic is available on both Android and iOS, but the new features are currently only available on iOS and are slated to be rolled out to Android this fall.