Transforming learning with AI tutors - Gustav Grimberg (Ezri)

EdTech Founders

In this episode: ⁠Frank Albert Coates⁠ is talking with ⁠Gustav Grimberg who is the co-founder of Ezri, a company dedicated to developing AI tutors that transform online learning. With a background in human-computer interaction, Gustav has long been passionate about creating technologies that are natural and intuitive for human beings to interact with, especially in education. In October 2023, he co-founded Ezri to bring this vision of affordable, personalised education to life.

Recently, Ezri launched its first AI tutors in Germany through a white-label model in collaboration with the K-12 publishers Cornelsen and Duden Learnattack. Their machine learning systems converted tens of thousands of videos, exercises, and articles into interactive AI tutors, offering personalized student support tailored to the content.

The company is now focused on releasing its next generation of AI tutors, which work in multiple modalities to deliver even more effective personal tutoring.

We talk about:

The role AI tutors will play in the future of education, how to incorporate effective human-computer interaction principles, challenges such as user interface design and privacy, voice interaction and enhanced dialogue management systems ….and lots more.

Outtakes:

• AI tutors will play a very important role in the future of education. What exactly they will look like and how they will work and how they will fit into the learning process are still questions that need to be addressed fully. But, at Ezri, we believe and we work towards a future where AI tutors will be a learning companion that all students will have.
• So how do you compare an AI tutor to a human tutor? There are similarities and there are differences, of course. And I think that going forward there will be ways that these two modes of learning will complement each other definitely.
• An important feature of human tutoring is a mutual understanding and feeling some kind of harmony or some kind of connection with the tutor. And this is something that is also important to definitely explore in AI tutoring systems. If you should make this or try to develop this interpersonal connection with the tutee, with the student. From what we see, it is definitely a path to go down to try and develop these more close relationships where the tutor has a better understanding of the student, has an ability to not just tutor, but also, go off topic sometimes to develop a more close connection to the student because that in the end can foster and promote better learning.
• I would love to have a really good voice system that works very well, especially with K-12 students. That delivers a very human like voice interaction. And then just find this dialogue manager that can really just steer the interaction as the best tutor in the whole world. So if I could order one thing and plug into our tutors, it would definitely be the best tutor dialogue management system, which we are working towards at Ezri.

The ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠EdTech Garage⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is a community for early-stage European EdTech startups where founders can scale up faster through the founder community, matchmaking and specialized resources. In this podcast series we interview startup founders & players supporting early-stage EdTech startups from across Europe. We get straight to the point in 20+ minutes and publish new episodes roughly every month.

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Host: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Frank Albert Coates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ehsansation