AI tutor

An AI tutor is an AI model that answers a learner's questions at any hour, in the learner's own language, and then sets practice aimed at the topics that learner gets wrong. It is usually built on a large language model, a model trained on huge amounts of text so that it can read and write it. A private tutor for every student has always been the most effective way to teach, and the least affordable. An AI tutor makes a version of it cheap enough for lakhs of students at once.

Here is how it works in general. The learner asks a question by typing it, speaking it or sending a photo of a problem from a book. The tutor's software first looks up the matching passages in the course's own material, such as its notes, solved examples and question bank. It sends those passages to the model together with the question. This method is called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and it keeps the answer close to what the course teaches. The model then explains the answer step by step, in Hindi, English or another language the learner has chosen. The learner can ask a follow-up question as often as they like. The software records which topic each question was about, and which practice questions the learner got wrong. From that record, it picks or writes the next set of practice questions. A teacher can read the conversations and see which topics the whole class is stuck on.

An AI tutor can also be wrong. A language model can state a wrong step or an invented fact in the same confident tone as a correct one. This is called AI hallucination. So a well-built tutor answers from the course's checked material, shows every step so that the learner can follow it, and lets teachers review its answers.

Take, for example, a NEET aspirant stuck on an organic chemistry question at midnight. AI doubt solving reads a photo of the question and explains each step of the reaction, when no teacher is awake.

Consider a child in a government school who has no tutor at home. Through WhatsApp-based learning, the child types a doubt about fractions into a chat app the family already uses, and gets an answer in Hindi.

Say an adult is learning spoken English. A language learning app lets the learner hold a conversation with the AI tutor, which corrects each sentence.

How is an AI tutor different from adaptive learning? Adaptive learning software chooses the next question from a fixed bank of questions, based on the last answer. It does not hold a conversation. An AI tutor explains in its own words, answers follow-up questions and can write new practice questions. Many products combine the two. An AI tutor is also different from a live online class, in which a human teacher teaches many students at the same time.