The Best AI Tutoring Tools for Studying

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming mainstream in higher education, and AI tutors are just one type among the many emerging software options.

These AI tools won’t help you cheat — educators use systems to help catch AI-enabled cheating and plagiarism. Instead, these AI tutoring tools help teach you material, suggest improvements, and create study materials for your essays, notes, and assignments.

Most of these tools build on OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT, which is a good tool on its own. However, the following tools are focused on education, studying, and note-taking. Each company uses its own database to train the AI on education-specific information.

Course Hero, a popular online study platform, just released a new AI tutor.

You can upload documents to Course Hero’s AI Study Tools and highlight sections you would like the AI to help with. The AI answers questions and offers further explanations, creates outlines, paraphrases content, connects you with human tutors, and finds matching content from Course Hero’s library.

The tool builds on OpenAI’s GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 Turbo. It uses Course Hero’s database and real-life tutors to answer questions and provide explanations.

Course Hero is compatible with PDFs, Word documents, pictures, and spreadsheets. Students can insert one document for free and pay for a Premier account or contribute content to the Course Hero library to access more AI tutoring.

Since Course Hero shares documents with its community, it recommends that students remove their names, phone numbers, and email addresses from the documents they plan to upload.

Studyable uses your images and PDFs to give you answers, explanations, and summaries for every question. Studyable’s AI chatbot can help you solve math problems, search the internet, and understand images and PDFs.

The AI can grade your essays, give helpful suggestions, and answer follow-up questions you have. You can also create instant flashcards from your notes, a syllabus, or a textbook.

Q-chat uses the Socratic method to ask questions that lead your critical thinking toward the answer, similar to a real-life instructor. The AI tutor can teach you, quiz you, or have you apply your knowledge to the material you want to learn.

Anyone can sample Q-Chat before signing up for Quizlet Plus.

Tutor AI offers crash courses on lots of different topics from the first grade to the Ph.D. level. After each class module, you have the option to simplify the lesson, give examples, take a quiz, and ask an AI more questions about the lesson.

You get your first module free and then can pay $10 a month to access the full library. According to Tutor AI, the site offers personalized classes and an AI that learns alongside you to see what method of teaching best fits your learning style.

While Otter.ai isn’t a tutor, it can transcribe your lectures for you in real time. The free version can transcribe 300 minutes a month for 30 minutes per recording. It can integrate into Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet to write and share notes. Otter also hosts an AI that can summarize your lecture.

After transcribing, you can utilize tools like Course Hero’s AI Study Tools and Studyable to create outlines and notes from the lecture.