Knowable

The world's first visually integrated AI tutoring platform

Comment

Inspiration

Every AI tutor on the market today has the same blind spot: it can't see the student's work. Kids either retype their math into a chat box (destroying the workflow) or photograph a finished page (destroying the feedback loop). But real tutoring — the kind that moves grades — happens while the pencil is moving. A human tutor watches you set up the problem, catches the sign error on line two, and intervenes before you've compounded the mistake for ten minutes.

I've tutored students from grade school through grad school. The magic was always the observation. Knowable exists to give every student in in the world an AI tutor that truly understands.

What it does

Real-time visually grounded AI tutoring with feedback that's aware of your problem-solving process.

How we built it

Knowable operates on MacOS, iPhone and iPad. On MacOS, it uses the native perspective correction desk view feature. On iPhone we use a self-trained model with over 300 labelled computer vision examples to perspective-correct slanted pictures of a piece of paper on a table.

Infra hosted across GCP, AWS and Azure, managed using terraform.

Challenges we ran into

  1. App store review took a while. The back and forth with the reviewers was annoying.
  2. Getting people install the MacOS app was beyond difficult. Ported to safari, it was much better but required a white-glove style tutorial. Figured out how to get it on iPhone and conversions are finally flowing.
  3. Apple's native page detection can't detect the page from a stood-up iphone. The only way was to train my own model with a hand-labelled dataset.
  4. Customers are exceedingly hard to come by for an edtech app during the Summer

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Making something that is genuinely novel and a real step towards a real AI tutor.
  2. Seeing people using it to learn the way I thought they would
  3. Training a CV model using hand-labelled data

What we learned

Distribution is hard. When teaching users to try out something new, the tutorials need to be absolutely pristine, the keywords need to be precisely aligned, and the funnels cannot be leaky at all.

What's next for Knowable

Training a page-reconstruction model, running more paid ads, engaging in social media marketing.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates