Samy Lahbabi
Samy is the Co-Founder and CEO of a new Educational AI venture called ProfessorBob.ai. He is based out of Paris, France and has been the CEO and COO of this fledgling venture for 4 years. He has extensive experience founding various businesses, as he co-founded The AI Institute and held the position of Director of Product, Innovation in Digital Publishing & Education at the Gutenberg Technology Lab as well. He went to school at L’ecole Polytechnique in Paris and has worked with some of Europe’s biggest thinkers and technology leaders.
ProfessorBob.ai
ProfessorBob is a new AI tutor that uses AI to produce adaptive learning. It utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) to deliver personalized educational experiences to learners. It employs NLP to teach, answer queries, and pose questions tailored to the unique needs of each student. This personalized approach aims to optimize memory retention and foster comprehensive development in learners.
Reflections
The secret to success for ProfessorBob lives in its adaptability and changing preferences based on the user. The more you use this service, the more it learns about you and caters its tutoring to fit your needs. They are making it a global product as it is mainly France based at the moment. I have no doubt that this is, and will continue to be, at the forefront of education technology as Samy has a wealth of experience in this field and founding other successful tech-based ventures.
References
École polytechnique. (n.d.). https://www.polytechnique.edu/en/news/professorbobai-revolutionizing-education-through-adaptive-learning-and-ai
L’ia au service de l’apprentissage. ProfessorBob.ai. (2023, March 28). https://professorbob.ai/
Personalize learning with professorbob.ai. ProfessorBob.ai. (2022, April 23). https://professorbob.ai/en/technology/
It’s hard to know ho successful this venture has been, and what it’s future will be once the larger players start to enter the market. On it’s surface, it has a lot of similarities to Khanmigo being developed by Khan Academy. That said, this a venture that I will have to look into deeper.
I think the goal of the project is to continue to grow UNTIL one of the big players buys them and folds them into their atmosphere. Much like Meta and Apple have done with VR and most emerging tech, it seems like you start small and build until your bought out.
This Founders Parade post is interesting as it connects to Zheng Xiong’s post on Coursera : https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec522/2023/06/10/founders-parade-daphne-koller-co-founder-of-coursera/ . What I am understanding is that ProfessorBob has an extension that allows it to connect to Coursera classes (as well as OpenClassrooms).
I second what Douglas has said with the uncertainty of ProfessorBob’s success. It would posit that its future success is unknown as well… I was quite underwhelmed by its website: https://professorbob.ai/en/technology/
On their home page, there is a section that includes three videos: two of which do not work saying “This video is private” and a third one that is exclusively in French, with French subtitles, but none in English, nor any other language for that matter. I speak French so I understood it, but many people would be excluded from this video.
On the Exercises page, there is a section at the bottom in French, while the rest of the site is in English. I suppose I am being nit-picky here, but I would assume that a business venture would want to have an extremely polished product, with all links functioning and the formatting done perfectly.
I have requested a demo from them as I would like to learn more about how ProfessorBob could work for additional language classes.
Thanks,
Maurice
Re-reading one of my sentences, I can see how poorly worded it was: “It would posit that its future success is unknown as well…” Well, of course the future is unknown… What I meant to say was that based on a website that has the issues that I mention in my post and that looks like it was created by a student, this could be a flash in the pan and I worry about how successful it will be.