SAN FRANCISCO (KERO) — How do students solve school's toughest problems? They can search for an answer in a book or maybe even ask a teacher, but now there's a new way.
At Bay Area-based educational organizations Khan Academy and Khan Labs, students are learning to solve problems themselves with an artificially intelligent tutor.
Say hello to the AI chatbot tutor, Khanmigo.
Khan Academy founder Sal Khan helped develop Khanmigo to be an extension of a teacher, offering personalized and immediate educational help for any student. The AI chatbot has knowledge of a variety of subjects, such as history, math, and science, in a variety of languages and for different grade levels.
Khanmigo will quiz students on the given subject matter or answer any questions about that topic. Students can even have conversations with characters like Ben Franklin or Winnie the Pooh to learn in alternative ways.
The goal of Khanmigo is to guide students toward learning by never giving up an answer or doing work for them.
"If you ask it how to solve a problem, it wants to try and walk you through how you would solve a similar type of problem," explained a student using Khanmigo. "So you can go back to that problem and use the techniques that you just saw and test it yourself and see if you could apply those."
Khan believes that artificial intelligence can be the next evolution of learning.
"Some of what... we're already doing at places like Khan Lab School, I would've thought were science-fiction a year ago and I wouldn't have thought would happen in my lifetime," said Khan. "That's literally happening in real classrooms already and it's going to be happening for tens, if not, hundreds of thousands of students this coming school year."
