Using GPT to build an AI tutor

Day 36 / 366

One of the App ideas that I am thinking of working on is to build a learning application that uses LLMs to help students understand concepts and solve their doubts. As a good starting point, I thought I would target class 10th students since board exams are coming up. I wanted to use this blog to discuss some of the features I think this app should have, and what challenges I think would come up.

In my opinion, the best application of LLM is replacing a repetitive job that a human would have done. For instance, using AI chatbots to replace customer care executives. I don’t think the entire job of a teacher is repetitive or replaceable by AI, but there are parts of it that are. For instance, basic doubt solving. Or checking answers given by students, or setting sample question papers.

So the app should ideally

• Answer basic doubts that students might have.
• Create practice questions for students
• Validate the answers that students give to those questions

Now since GPT models have been trained on a lot of text from the internet, they might already know about the 10th CBSE board syllabus, but it might not be up to date. Fortunately, all the CBSE textbooks are available in digital formats, and we can use that as a source of knowledge for our LLM. This will ensure that the answers given by the LLM are as accurate as possible.

Another challenge I think might occur is the visual element. A lot of teaching requires diagrams and charts, something which an LLM model might not be great at out of the box.

Adding a text-to-speech feature to this app will allow students to listen to notes and explanations to easily revise a subject.

Well the board exams start in 10 days, so I am not sure if I will be able to make something like this so soon, but I will definitely give it a try.