Google Learn About is the patient teacher with a bag full of tricks we all wanted as kids

AI chatbots can be useful tools for learning about the world, but they aren’t usually designed as educators and often are full of caveats regarding where their data comes from. Google has debuted a new AI tutor called Learn About to solve those issues. It’s a personal tutor capable of adapting its teaching style in real time. Learn About isn’t just a conversational AI chatbot; it combines visual aids and the ability to expand and simplify subjects as needed, like an interactive and intelligent textbook.

Learn About doesn’t rely on the Gemini AI models employed by Google in most of its AI services. Instead, it uses the LearnLM model introduced at Google I/O this year. LearnLM has been trained specifically on educational and research-oriented data and is supposed to encourage users to think for themselves. That means the AI doesn’t just give a quick answer but tries to impart the facts and the knowledge behind the straightforward answer, including diagrams and annotated text, along with suggested topics related to your initial query.

LearnLM also makes sure the common hallucinations and wrong information regurgitated by AI chatbots are less of an issue. You can ask a question, suggest a topic, or even upload images and let the AI run with whatever it can find about what’s in the images. Learn About is currently available to a limited number of U.S. users, but expansion is likely coming soon.

Robotic education

As an experiment, I asked about building a humanoid robot. Learn About didn’t just cite an encyclopedia on what that would entail. Instead, I got a whole list of necessary elements broken down with images, context boxes, and further reading. The…