After a long stint of iOS exclusivity, Socratic app is now available on Android

Why it matters to you

If mom and dad can’t help you with your homework, then maybe artificially intelligent Socratic app can.

The days when students have to flip through textbooks to find solutions to homework problems may soon be coming to an end. Rather, they’ll be taking pictures with their smartphones to feed problems into an artificially intelligent app if Socratic has its way.

Socratic is an education-focused startup, and what it offers is quite similar to Quora — a space where students can ask questions and receive answers from their peers or just about anyone. Of course, these questions are particular to specific subjects such as Science, Math, Social Sciences, and the Humanities. The company has had an app called Homework Genius in stealth mode for about a year, and it’s finally ready for the student masses.

Now renamed after the company, Socratic is an app that claims to help you with your homework thanks to the help of artificial intelligence. Simply snap a picture of your word problem, give the app a few seconds to analyze it, and you’ll then be reading all about the proper way to solve it.

The app doesn’t exactly offer answers, instead, you get an explainer that dives into the concept, problem, and teaches students how to solve it. The beta app involved teachers, students, and more than 150,000 users — and Socratic used it to collect “millions of photos of real homework questions” to make the AI engine more powerful.

The app is well-designed and slick, and results are presented in the form of vertical cards. The first is the explainer, and the rest will be anything else the AI can scrounge up about the problem — videos, definitions, and web results. Much of the “explainer” content has been developed by the Socratic community, and as the app has grown up and grown its user base, so too have the number of subjects it can help you with.

In early May, Socratic announced a number of changes that promise to make the app available to more than 1.5 billion people across the world — an Android app, the availability of six new languages, and a new experience for iPad.

Now, you can ask Socratic questions about math and science in English, Spanish, Indonesian, French, Portuguese, and German. “Over time, we’ll continue adding languages until we can help every student in the language they understand best,” the team promised. Moreover, Socratic has released a new version of the app for the iPad. After all, learning on a larger screen always seems to be preferable over a smaller screen, right? And of course, with Android availability, Socratic considerably expands its user base, as much of the world doesn’t operate on the iOS platform.

“We started Socratic because we believe that students everywhere deserve the best help when they’re learning,” the Socratic team wrote. “With an Android app and support for six of the world’s major languages, we’re a little bit closer to our goal.”

Download for iOS

Download for Android

Article originally published in July 2016. Updated on 05-04-2017 by Lulu Chang: Added news that Socratic is now available for Android.