Socratic (Google)


Socratic by Google is an education tech company that offers a mobile app for students. The app uses AI technology to help students with their homework by providing educational resources like videos, definitions, Q&A, and more. Socratic's stated mission is to Make Learning Easier.
Socratic was first launched as a web product in 2013 by Chris Pedregal and Shreyans Bhansali, in New York City, United States. They launched their app under the same name in 2016.
In March 2018, Socratic was acquired by Google for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was kept hidden until August 2019, when the Founder and CTO Shreyans Bhansali announced that the company had joined Google. The wake of news was accompanied by a redesigned iOS app.
Starting from August 2018, Socratic is no longer available for user contributions; the contributions were kept, however it is no longer possible to ask/answer/edit question. The change was announced by the curators of the site/organization, however no clear reason was given.

Technology

The Socratic app utilizes AI technology to accurately predict which concepts will help a student solve their question. Over months, millions of real student questions were analyzed and classified. Then the app uses that data to guess on future questions and provide specific education content.
The app works by letting students take a photo of a homework question. Using OCR, the app is able to read their photo and classify it using the technology described above. Students receive various “cards” in the app with different learning resources such as definitions, YouTube videos, Q&A, and original content and illustrations written by the Socratic.org web community.
In January 2017, Socratic added additional math features to the app, including step-by-step equation help and graphs.

Subjects

There are in total 4 main groups of subjects on Socratic.org which have sub-branches included: