Socratic (Google)

Socratic 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, links and more.[2]

Socratic
Type of businessSubsidiary
Type of site
App, website
Created byChris Pedregal, Shreyans Bhansali
IndustryEducation, Internet, Mobile Learning
ParentGoogle LLC
URLsocratic.org
Users11 million (estimated)[1]
Launched2013

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 made public in August 2019, when the Founder and CTO (now engineering manager) Shreyans Bhansali announced that the company had joined Google. The wake of news was accompanied by a redesigned iOS app.[3]

Starting from August 2018, Socratic became no longer available for user contributions; past contributions were kept, but it was no longer possible to ask, answer, or edit questions.[4]

Technology

The Socratic app utilizes artificial intelligence 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.[5][6]

The app works by letting students take a photo of a homework question,[7] a feature that was later added to Google Lens. Using Optical character recognition (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.[8]

In January 2017, Socratic added additional Math features to the app, including step-by-step equation help and graphs.[9]

Subjects

There is currently a total of four main groups of subjects on Socratic:[1]

See also

References
  1. "Socratic". Socratic.org.
  2. Bhansali, Shreyans (July 14, 2016). "Making learning way easier — Introducing the Socratic app". Building Socratic. Retrieved November 9, 2016.
  3. Perez, Sarah (August 16, 2019). "Google discloses its acquisition of mobile learning app Socratic as it relaunches on iOS". TechCrunch. TechCrunch. Retrieved December 8, 2019.
  4. "Socratic.org website will close to new contributions". blog.socratic.org/. Retrieved January 2, 2019.
  5. "Socratic Application Allows Students To Post Homework Questions, Get Answers". The Daily Nexus. Retrieved November 9, 2016.
  6. "Socratic Used Extensive User Testing to Build Powerful Free "Digital Tutor" App — Emerging Education Technologies". emergingedtech.com. August 23, 2016. Retrieved November 9, 2016.
  7. "How to Make Learning Easier than Cheating (EdSurge News)". EdSurge. Retrieved November 9, 2016.
  8. Bhansali, Shreyans (July 14, 2016). "Making learning way easier — Introducing the Socratic app". Building Socratic. Retrieved November 9, 2016.
  9. "Homework Help App, Socratic, Launches Math Features". newswire.com (Press release). Retrieved January 18, 2017.

Further reading
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