The State of Conversational Voice AI in Education

In 1988, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago, wrote an essay purporting tutorials as "the best learning conditions we can devise." Tutors, Bloom claimed, could raise student achievement by two full standard deviations—or, in statistical parlance, two "sigmas"—essentially going from the 50th percentile to the 98th. 

For forty years, education technology has chased a seemingly impossible goal: matching the effectiveness of one-on-one tutoring at scale. While the potential impact was clear, the economics never worked, until now.

While human tutors typically cost $30-50 per hour, Conversational AI solutions can deliver comparable outcomes at $3-5, a 90% lower cost. This order of magnitude cost reduction represents the potential to transform personalized education from a luxury good into reach for the mass-market.

But the most profound insights aren't about cost savings—they're about how voice is revealing counterintuitive truths about focus, engagement, and assessment that could reshape education entirely. Early implementations by companies like Chess.com, Coursology, and SchoolAI point to a future where technology doesn't just make learning cheaper, but redefines what effective learning looks like.

Uninterrupted focus: how voice enables deeper immersion

When Chess.com added a voice to their Dr. Wolf instructor, they expected the primary benefit would be accessibility. Instead, they discovered that voice enabled a fundamentally deeper level of focus for learners.

With voice guidance, students could keep their eyes locked on the board and their fingers on the pieces, fully immersing themselves in the spatial and strategic dimensions of the game. "Voice is not just a feature—it's brought a whole new dimension to learning chess online," explains Gabe Jacobs, the product manager for Dr. Wolf. 

By freeing students from the need to constantly shift their visual attention, voice allowed them to stay in a state of uninterrupted concentration. With work underway to add conversational ability to the app, it's a new age for the game of kings.

The need for students to split visual focus may be a hidden tax on digital learning—one that voice can eliminate. When students can stay visually focused on the primary learning material, whether chessboard or calculus, they can engage more deeply and grasp concepts more intuitively. 

Voice becomes a way to maintain immersion while still receiving guidance, enabling a kind of ambient support that enhances understanding rather than disrupting it.

Interruptibility: turning passive consumption into active inquiry

Coursology's experience takes this insight even further, showing how interruption, when implemented intentionally, can transform learning. Coursology, which started as an AI homework helper, grew from zero to 50,000 users in its first month by helping students understand course materials more effectively. With its newest feature, Coursology users can interrupt AI-generated podcasts with questions, turning passive content consumption into active exploration.

"The aha moment is when students realize they can upload their most impenetrable course materials and engage in a dialogue with speakers who know everything about those topics," explains founder Colby Schmidt. Rather than breaking focus, the ability to spontaneously interrogate the material enables students to learn more deeply and efficiently.

This feature reveals a counterintuitive truth about engagement: the ability to interrupt without losing momentum may be more important than delivering flawless, linear content. The natural back-and-forth of questions and answers keeps students engaged with the material itself, not just plodding along a predetermined lesson plan.

At one-tenth the cost of human tutoring, AI allows this kind of dynamic interaction to be scaled to millions of students. The implications are profound: with tools like Coursology, the availability of on-demand personalized tutoring will grow by an order of magnitude in the coming years. Coursology itself is about to tip one million users.

Assessment: from teaching to insight generation

SchoolAI's evolution reveals yet another unexpected opportunity. One feature allows students to learn through conversation: high school history students can speak with figures like Abraham Lincoln or Amelia Earhart, for example. What started as a platform for interactive conversations evolved into something more fundamental: a powerful tool for understanding how learning happens.

By capturing data on where students struggle, what helps them break through, and how their understanding develops, SchoolAI gives teachers unprecedented visibility into their students' learning journeys. "We're not replacing teachers—we're giving them Ironman suits," explains CTO Cahlan Sharp. "We're saving them over 10 hours a week on assessment, so they can focus on actually teaching."

This points to perhaps the most exciting potential of voice AI in education: the ability to surface actionable insights about the learning process itself. Every voice interaction becomes a data point, illuminating patterns and interventions that would be impossible to discern at scale otherwise. In this sense, the real value of AI may lie not in the teaching, but in the metaknowledge it generates about teaching.

What these patterns tell us about learning

These early implementations don't just suggest incremental improvements—they reveal fundamental truths about how people learn. Each discovery challenges our basic assumptions about education.

First, visual attention is more precious than we imagined. Traditional digital learning often forces students to context-switch between reading instructions, watching demonstrations, and practicing skills. This isn't just inconvenient—it's cognitively expensive. Voice liberates visual attention, allowing students to focus entirely on understanding what's in front of them.

Second, the ability to interrupt without losing context might be more important than perfect instruction. The natural flow of questions and answers maintains engagement better than even the most polished linear content. At one-tenth the cost of human tutoring, companies can now scale this kind of dynamic interaction to millions of students.

Third, the real value of AI in education might not be in the teaching itself, but in what it reveals about how learning happens. Every interaction creates data about where students struggle, what helps them break through, and how understanding develops. SchoolAI's evolution shows how this insight alone can transform education—giving teachers unprecedented visibility into their students' learning journeys.

From insights to the future of learning

For builders exploring conversational AI, these early signals suggest opportunities to not just optimize existing educational practices, but to reimagine them entirely:

1. Rethinking immersion: Rather than treating voice as just another interface, consider how it could enable deeper, more focused engagement with primary learning materials. How might you design experiences that capitalize on the full visual immersion that voice allows?
2. Designing for interruption: Instead of trying to perfect content delivery, consider how you might facilitate more natural, inquisitive interaction. How could you enable students to steer their own learning, to follow their curiosity without breaking momentum?
3. Capturing metaknowledge: Look for opportunities to surface insights not just about what students are learning, but how they're learning. How might you leverage voice data to illuminate the structures of cognition and comprehension?

The shift that voice represents in education may be as profound as the transition from scheduled broadcast to on-demand streaming in entertainment. Just as platforms like Netflix enabled fundamentally new kinds of storytelling, conversational AI could enable entirely new modes of learning. "The shift in education over the next decade will be from memorizing things to actually retaining knowledge," notes Schmidt. This isn't just speculation—it's already happening.

When Chess.com lets students maintain complete visual focus on the board, when Coursology enables interruption without disruption, when SchoolAI gives teachers unprecedented insight into how their students learn—these aren't just features. They're early signals of how voice AI could reshape education entirely.

In our own data, we’ve seen EdTech lead the charge in conversational AI usage since February 2024. Alongside sales and support, EdTech use cases continue to appear, complementing existing features and inspiring new ones.

For product teams, this represents more than just a feature opportunity. It's a chance to fundamentally rethink how technology can enhance learning. The economics tell one story: AI tutoring at one-tenth the cost means personalized learning could finally reach everyone. But the more profound opportunity lies in what these early implementations reveal: that conversational AI might be the key to unlocking deeper understanding.

The companies that will define this era will be those that see voice not just as a medium for delivering content, but as an unprecedented window into how we learn—insights that will shape the lives and livelihoods of generations to come.