Edtech Unicorn, PhysicsWallah recently said that it is introducing Alakh AI, a personalised assistant for students, which would act like a study companion and provide access to learning. 

This new platform is expected to include various generative AI capabilities and features that would help students to understand and learn new concepts easily and in a simplified manner, trained on PhysicsWallah’s teaching materials and style. 

In an exclusive interview with AIM, PhysicsWallah chief technology officer Devesh Mishra said that the first beta version of Alakh AI is still in the development stage, and looks to release it by end of this year. 

Founded in 2016, by Alakh Pandey, PhysicsWallah offers a variety of courses for students of all grades, from Class 6 to Class 12, as well as for students preparing for competitive exams such as the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET). 

PhysicsWallah became a unicorn in June last year, after raising $100 million in a Series A funding round from WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures. The company was valued at $1.1 billion after the funding round. Coincidentally, the name Alakh AI has also been named after the founder. 

Alakh AI will serve as the powerhouse behind PhysicsWallah’s problem-solving engine, enabling personalisation and adaptive learning paths. The AI will empower the Study Companion and various educational nuggets, ensuring a comprehensive and tailored learning experience for students. 

He emphasised that Alakh AI isn’t just another tutoring service or an AI tutor (of any kind); it’s designed to be a unique “Study Companion.” Unlike traditional tutoring platforms, Alakh AI aims to be a student’s dedicated companion for both academic and non-academic support. 

The companion will assist students in group study sessions, resolving academic and non-academic queries, providing motivation, and even creating personalised study planners. Mishra emphasised that it isn’t a personal tutor but a companion to study alongside.

One of the most ambitious features of Alakh AI is its language agnosticism. PhysicsWallah is striving to make this innovative learning tool accessible to a global audience, supporting multiple languages to cater to diverse learners. 

Moreover, PhysicsWallah is harnessing the power of generative AI to translate its extensive YouTube content into various languages. This move will not only enhance accessibility but also significantly reduces operational costs for the edtech company.

PhysicsWallah is going big on AI. Recently Alakh said: “No one has really used AI at scale in edtech, it will be great if we can do that because we have the scale. We won’t have to train AI on open AI – we will train it on PhysicsWallah’s own datasets.”