Brainly: Democratizing education by giving students worldwide access to expert study help, 24/7
About Brainly
When they’re stuck on a problem, more than 350 million students and parents turn to Brainly. The Kraków-based technology company democratizes education with a collaborative online learning platform where students can ask questions and get answers instantly. Parents can link their accounts to the ones of their kids. Today, Brainly is supported in multiple languages in more than 35 countries.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usUsing Vision AI, Brainly built a “Snap to Solve” feature for mobile that helps students find answers via photo queries, achieving a 70% satisfaction rate while increasing paid subscription numbers.
Google Cloud results
- Bolsters user engagement with intuitive photo query feature for smartphones, achieving 6x more engagement than traditional typed queries
- Supports students in different languages across 35 countries with multilingual capabilities of Google Vision AI
- Increases revenues, boosting paid subscription numbers, thanks to high satisfaction with “Snap to Solve” searches
- Enables 10x increase in instant answers to queries by improving machine learning algorithms with TensorFlow
- Ensures stable service even during record peaks thanks to automatic scaling to the demand with Google Cloud
70% of users happy with “Snap to Solve” search results
In education, technology is a game changer. With the world at their fingertips, the students have become the masters. But while tech is changing the way we learn, it’s not a silver bullet. Classrooms are constantly evolving, and teachers are using smart technology to drive engagement or personalize learning plans. However, not all learning happens in the classroom. When students are doing their homework or studying for exams, there’s not always someone around to ask for advice. Enter Brainly.
For more than 350 million students, teachers and parents worldwide, Brainly is the place they go to when there’s a problem they can’t solve by themselves. The knowledge-sharing community crowdsources answers to any question, helping students tackle their toughest assignments with expert guidance, 24/7. Parents can create their own accounts to follow their kids’ educational progress and help them find the right answers.
Brainly was founded in 2009, long before COVID-19 swept the globe and forced students and teachers to rediscover what it means to learn and teach without a classroom. In this new world, Brainly’s services suddenly became even more popular than ever before.
“The pandemic has been tough on all of us, but in many ways, students were the ones who were left behind,” explains Bill Salak, CTO at Brainly. “That’s why students turned to our platform in record numbers. This didn’t just challenge us in terms of the sheer traffic, but also made us think about features to help our students get back on track with their education.”
“The kinds of problems students encounter are pretty similar around the world, but we need to make sure that we can solve them in multiple languages. Other AI solutions we looked at focused mainly on English and a few additional languages, whereas Vision AI enables us to support our students in the language they prefer. That’s why Google Cloud was the right choice for us.”
—Gabriel Habryn, Domain Lead, BrainlyMobile learning done right with Vision AI
Students increasingly use their mobile devices to help them learn and access support, but queries on a smartphone are more cumbersome than simple desktop searches. That’s why the Brainly team came up with its Snap to Solve feature: instead of typing in questions manually, students can simply take a photo of them with the Brainly app and select from a set of relevant answers from the Brainly database.
Because Brainly is active in 35 countries, every new solution needs to cover a variety of languages and work natively in all of them. Besides scalability, performance, accuracy, and price, the multilingual capabilities of Google Cloud made the Vision AI platform a perfect fit for Brainly.
“The kinds of problems students encounter are pretty similar around the world, but we need to make sure that we can solve them in multiple languages,” explains Gabriel Habryn, Domain Lead at Brainly. “Other AI solutions we looked at focused mainly on English and a few additional languages, whereas Vision AI enables us to support our students in the language they prefer. That’s why Google Cloud was the right choice for us.”
“At launch, only a small percentage of queries delivered an instant answer in the US region. By improving our machine learning algorithms with TensorFlow, we’re achieving ten times more, and that number is growing. More than 70% of our users are very happy with the results they’re getting, which is even higher than for text queries.”
—Grzegorz Kućma, Senior Manager, Mobile, BrainlyAnswers within seconds, in two languages
With help from Brainly’s Snap to Solve feature, students and parents can tackle any written question, but also math problems. Here’s how it works: with the Brainly app, users simply snap a photo of the question, and Vision AI’s optical character recognition (OCR) analyzes the image’s content to extract words and sentences. If there’s a perfect match for the query, Brainly delivers an instant answer within seconds, if not, the app falls back to a full text search, combing through Brainly’s entire knowledge base to find a selection of relevant answers.
Snap to Solve is a hit with students. They love its convenience and the fact that they no longer have to type in questions manually on their phones. “As soon as we introduced the Snap to Solve solution, we experienced a huge shift from typed queries to photos,” says Grzegorz Kućma, Senior Manager, Mobile at Brainly. “Today, we’re observing engagement that’s significantly higher for photo queries compared to text queries.”
High accuracy, high satisfaction
Brainly is constantly optimizing its search algorithms and machine learning models, but the progress has already been astounding. Using TensorFlow’s Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder, the team developed an in-house solution to find instant answers for queries. “At launch, only a small percentage of queries delivered an instant answer in the US region,” says Kućma. “By improving our machine learning algorithms with Tensorflow, we’re achieving ten times more, and that number is growing. More than 70% of our users are very happy with the results they’re getting, which is even higher than for text queries.”
While Brainly’s services can be used for free, there’s a Brainly Plus subscription that gives users an ad-free experience and access to all answers and more. The happier students are with the Snap to Solve results, the more likely they are to use it, explains Kućma: “We’ve observed that users who received instant answers are more likely to buy our subscription, because they see the value of our product. The better our solution, the better we can monetize our services.”
And photo searches aren’t Brainly’s only novelty. While Snap to Solve queries are the most popular way to find answers, voice search is also gathering steam. Using Android’s speech to text features, the Brainly app can deliver answers to audio queries as well, giving students another way to avoid typed queries. “While Snap to Solve is definitely going to be the most popular way of searching in the future, audio queries may overtake and replace regular typed searches,” says Kućma. “With Google Cloud, we can deliver excellent quality on both.”
Scaling to the needs of students
When COVID-19 closed down classrooms around the world, Brainly quickly gained tens of millions of new users. Meanwhile, existing students were more dependent on the platform than ever before, leading to peaks in traffic. Thanks to the scalability of Google Cloud, the team didn’t need to worry about availability and performance issues.
“During the pandemic, we really had to raise the quota to meet the demand,” says Habryn. “Because Google Vision scales to our needs automatically, there was no technical effort necessary from our side. Even during record peaks, we were able to focus on improving our solution, rather than make sure that it’s working.”
Scaling up resources is also a cost question, and the flexibility of Google Cloud helps Brainly make better spending decisions in line with the company’s budget. For example, Android enables online OCR processing while ML Kit enables this offline, the latter being more cost-efficient. “Scaling up generates more cost, and the ability to switch between the online and offline OCR solution gives us an additional opportunity to control costs,” says Michał Leszek, Director of Information Technology and Data Protection Officer at Brainly.
“Everyone who’s ever been to school knows what it’s like to be stuck on a problem you just can’t solve, but not everyone has the same resources to get the right help. At Brainly, we’re using Google Cloud technology to build a solution that democratizes access to education and helps students who often get left behind.”
—Bill Salak CTO, BrainlyDemocratizing education with Google Cloud
Students worldwide already love Brainly’s new Snap to Solve capabilities, but the team is constantly thinking about ways to make it even better. In the future, it might recognize handwriting as well, which is supported by Vision AI. Because every language is different, developers at Brainly also work hard to optimize text recognition in different languages.
Much like its users, Brainly will never stop learning. But every new answer, every new feature, and every gain in accuracy is in service of a larger goal: democratizing education. “Everyone who’s ever been to school knows what it’s like to be stuck on a problem you just can’t solve,” says Bill Salak, CTO at Brainly. “But not everyone has the same resources to get the right help. At Brainly, we’re using Google Cloud technology to build a solution that democratizes access to education and helps students who often get left behind.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Brainly
When they’re stuck on a problem, more than 350 million students and parents turn to Brainly. The Kraków-based technology company democratizes education with a collaborative online learning platform where students can ask questions and get answers instantly. Parents can link their accounts to the ones of their kids. Today, Brainly is supported in multiple languages in more than 35 countries.