An AI Solution Democratizes Access to Education

Summary:

An online learning platform leverages AI to allow students to find answers by submitting photo queries. This resulted in a 70% satisfaction rate and boosted paid subscription growth.

Client: 

Brainly is an education company founded in 2009, with offices in Kraków, Poland, and headquarters in New York City. It provides an AI-powered platform designed to help students and parents with homework.

Problem Statement: 

Brainly serves as a platform for over 350 million students globally when they seek help with homework. This knowledge-sharing community crowdsources answers to a wide range of questions, offering expert guidance around the clock to help students overcome their toughest challenges. 

Students are increasingly turning to their mobile devices for learning and support, but entering queries on a smartphone can be more cumbersome compared to the ease of desktop searches. The company’s goal is to simplify the learning experience and make it more efficient.

Results: 

• A 70% student satisfaction rate.
• 24/7 support for students in multiple languages across 35 countries.
• 6x increase in engagement with photo-based queries than traditional typed queries.
• A 10x increase in instant query responses by enhancing ML algorithms using TensorFlow.  
• A stable service during peak demand periods through automatic scaling with Google Cloud.
• Growth in revenue from subscriptions.

AI Solution Overview:

The Brainly team introduced the “Snap to Solve” feature, allowing students to take a photo of their questions using the app instead of typing them out. The app then provides a selection of relevant answers from Brainly’s extensive database.

Since Brainly operates in 35 countries, every new feature must support multiple languages and function seamlessly across all of them.  To achieve this,

Brainly utilized Google Cloud’s Vision AI due to its scalability, performance, accuracy, affordability, and robust multilingual capabilities.

The team leveraged TensorFlow’s Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder to build an in-house solution that quickly finds instant answers to user queries across multiple languages.

With the Brainly app, users can simply take a photo of a question, and Vision AI’s optical character recognition (OCR) processes the image to extract words and sentences. If an exact match is found, Brainly provides an instant answer in seconds. If not, the app switches to a full text search, scanning Brainly’s entire knowledge base to offer a selection of relevant answers.

References: 

1. 5 AI Case Studies in Education. https://www.vktr.com/ai-disruption/5-ai-case-studies-in-education/
2.  Brainly: Democratizing education by giving students worldwide access to expert study help, 24/7. https://cloud.google.com/customers/brainly
3. An end-to-end platform for machine learning. https://www.tensorflow.org/

Industry: Education Services

Vendors: Google Cloud, TensorFlow

Client/Clients: 

Publication Date: 2024