Socratic is best known as Google’s free AI-powered learning app that connects students with online resources to help them understand their school work. However, according to Reddit users, Socratic was integrated into the Google app around October 2024 (Source).
Google has yet to make an official statement about the move, so we will update this article if they release any new information.
In the meantime, let’s explore what we do know about Socratic.
Socratic is most famous for being a free, easy-to-use learning app from Google that uses AI technology to help high school and college students figure out their homework (Source).
Its main function is to analyze student questions and provide relevant online resources, including:
It’s kind of like having a tutor in your back pocket, making it convenient and accessible for any student with a smartphone or tablet. Don’t be fooled by its simplicity though — Socratic runs on some serious Google technologies.
Since Google has yet to comment on how Socratic works with its rumored integration into the Google app, we’ll review how Socratic works from the perspective that it uses the same technology as the Socratic by Google app (we’ll update this article if Google provides any new information).
Socratic used Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) and search technologies to analyze student questions and find the best online resources to help them figure out the answers (Source).
Though the tech giant uses AI in many products, the technology’s text and speech recognition capabilities played a key role in the app. They helped analyze the content of questions so the app could provide the best online resources. (Source and Source)
After downloading the Socratic by Google app, students could ask questions in three different ways (Source):
Whether students entered queries into the app via text, image, or voice, Google’s AI technology could understand their questions and match them with helpful results. The keyword here is “helpful.” The goal isn’t to simply give students the answers but to provide them with the right learning materials to learn the core concepts and figure things out for themselves.
To address this, the developers trained and built algorithms using Google technology to find the underlying concepts of a student’s question. They would then connect them with online resources to help them understand those concepts. (Source)
For example, a student could submit a question asking them to calculate the length of one side of a right-angled triangle. If the question provided the length of the other two sides, the app could identify that the student needs to understand the Pythagoras Theorem to answer. It would then provide learning materials to help them understand the concept.
Students who could benefit from even more help could have Socratic break down complex concepts into smaller lessons or refer to 1000+ subject guides, which made it accessible for students of all skill levels. (Source) Although Socratic has changed throughout the years, this accessibility was a big part of why it was founded in the first place. (Source)
With their goal of creating an accessible learning community by bringing together teacher-created content in a central location, Chris Pedregal and Shreyans Bhansali co-founded Socratic in 2013. (Source and Source)
Since then, there have been multiple versions of Socratic. Not to mention, a very famous new owner — Google.
Formerly known as Vespr, the New York-based education tech company Socratic created a community-driven platform by the same name where teachers could create and upload free educational videos for users. (Source and Source)
It was similar to sites like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and Khan Academy. (Source)
They may have had teachers in mind, but as long as the video was related to an existing topic, anyone could upload their content to Socratic. (Source)
However, it wasn’t just a one-way street. Users could also request new subjects and videos, and the community would vote on which should be featured on the website. (Source)
Socratic started with a small library of about 800 science-related videos covering tricky subjects like physics and chemistry. (Source)
With an active community suggesting new topics, though, it wasn’t long before the website branched out into other subjects.
From here, Socratic became less of a science-focused video site and more of a general Q&A community like Quora. (Source)
It was a place where students could post questions about their schoolwork and get them answered by experts. (Source)
With over 16 million students benefitting from the website, this format was no doubt successful (Source).
In 2015, retired chemistry professor Ernest Z. reached over 1 million students alone with his contributions to the website — a number that eventually grew to around 98 million (Source and Source)
Still, the developers felt they needed to get on the platform that students used most if they were truly going to make learning as easy as possible: their phones.
In 2016, the first version of the Socratic app was released for iOS, enabling students to “point the camera at a question, and we’ll teach you how to answer it.” AI was also incorporated into the app to help enhance it. (Source)
In creating the app, they had experts and creators sort through hundreds of thousands of student questions and split them up by their core concepts. (Source)
They then fed these sorted questions into machine learning algorithms to train their system until it could accurately identify the concepts a student would need to understand to answer the question. (Source)
Even the educational content itself was optimized for mobile. Instead of providing dense, comprehensive content that was slow to load and hard to read on devices, the Socratic team went for “simplicity and intuitiveness.” (Source).
Short videos, short sentences, GIFs, and images were prioritized to help students get the most out of the app. (Source)
Socratic continued in both website and app form until 2018 (Source).
However, they started making changes in February 2018, removing four secondary features from the app (Source):
They found that users weren’t using these social features, so they removed them to focus on answering homework questions instead. (Source)
Then, in June 2018 they decided to transition to a read-only version of their Q&A website and close it to new accounts and contributions as of August. (Source)
They wanted to focus 100% on the app moving forward, believing it was the best way to achieve their original mission of making learning as accessible as possible. (Source)
Users who commented on the Socratic team’s post about the move weren’t thrilled with the change. (Source)
Some reported that they preferred to put their phones away while studying, while others pointed out that not everyone has a smartphone. (Source)
Despite this discontent from users, something was going on behind the scenes that may have impacted this decision: being acquired by Google.
Google officially announced its acquisition of Socratic in August 2019. (Source)
However, co-founder Bhansali reports that Google first acquired Socratic in 2018. (Source and Source)
The merger meant major changes for Socratic. Though it appeared that Google wanted to keep Socratic as an AI-powered tutor, the developers weren’t allowed to keep their existing codebase. (Source)
They had to restart Socratic from scratch and rebuild it on Google’s stack, re-solving problems they previously addressed for their original app. (Source)
Take the machine learning system they used to identify the core topics in student questions, for example. After the Google acquisition, they had to ensure the system was compatible with the tech giant’s Search techniques and up to their Search standards, which Bhansali claims were higher than their own. (Source)
After a little pushback from Google, they managed to keep one thing though: Ceebo, the Socratic app mascot. (Source)
The new Socratic by Google app launched on iOS in August 2019 and Android in February 2020, and continued to help students with their homework questions until 2024 (Source and Source)
In October 2024, according to a post on Reddit, Socratic users logging into the app were greeted with a screen that said: “Socratic has moved to the Google app”. (Source)
More specifically, Redditors say that Google integrated Socratic into its Lens feature (Source and Source).
Unfortunately, many people aren’t happy with the move, with some saying it’s more difficult to use and even provides incorrect AI-generated answers. (Source)
Since Google hasn’t released an official comment about the move, it’s hard to say exactly how or why they integrated Socratic into the Google app.
We’ll update this article once that information becomes available.
Google may have bought the education tech company for an undisclosed sum, but it didn’t always have the tech giant’s money behind it.
Before the acquisition, Socratic raised $7.5 million over two funding rounds. (Source)
In Socratic’s seed round, announced on October 8, 2013, it raised $1.5 million. (Source)
There were seven investors and four partner investors, including:
(Source)
With this money, the Socratic team hoped to grow its video library exponentially. (Source) Its long-term goal at the time was to give students the best learning resources available to help answer their questions. (Source)
Socratic’s Series A round was announced on March 25, 2015. (Source) Here, it raised $6 million from four investors and two partner investors, including:
(Source)
Although the investors likely had various reasons for funding Socratic, Shasta partner Sean Flynn notes that they saw potential in Socratic. They previously invested in an online Q&A community for IT professionals, Spiceworks, which saw great success (Source). Socratic, they believed, could become a similar, go-to online destination for academic knowledge. (Source)
On October 1, 2018, Socratic invested in Series A funding for Meritize, a provider of accessible student loans for skills-based education. (Source and Source) Socratic was one of ten investors, and the investment was valued at $13.2 million. (Source)
As of October 2024, Socratic is no longer available through the Google Play or App Store. (Source and Source).
However, the app doesn’t appear to be gone completely, as Reddit users report being directed to use Google Lens to get the same kind of Socratic help. (Source)
So, instead of showing you how to use the old Socratic app, we’ll share a brief overview of how students can use Google Lens for homework help.
With Google Chrome, it’s easy to use Google Lens on a desktop:
If you don’t already have your computer, the first step is to download Google Chrome. Then, open it up. (Source)
Now, find your question. Though the app is no longer available, the Socratic website still provides a list of example questions that you can use to see how it works. (Source) We’ll use one of their example math questions at the bottom here.
There are two different ways to search with Google Lens:
Both methods bring up a screen that says “Select anything to search with Google Lens”. Simply use the cursor to create a box around your question.
After you draw your box, Google Lens gets to work. On the right side of your screen, you’ll see a popup with information about how to solve your problem.
You can click the items under “Find solutions on the web” for step-by-step instructions on solving the problem or scroll down to check out visual matches and other related websites and online resources.
Though it provides the same information, the app works a little differently.
The Google Lens app works similarly for both Android and iPhone users. For this article, we’ll show you how it works on Android.
Find and download the Google Lens app on either the Google Play or App Store. Then, open it up. At the top of the screen, you should see the option to “Search with your camera” with three buttons underneath: Translate, Search, and Homework.
After selecting the “Homework” button, a little area with what looks like brackets will appear on your screen. Point your camera at your homework question, ensuring it shows up within those brackets. Then, take a picture of the problem by clicking the white circular button at the bottom of the screen.
The Google Lens results will appear at the bottom of your screen. Swipe up for a look at all of the learning resources available, including solving steps and graphs, and other relevant online learning materials.
Though it no longer appears to be a standalone app, the Socratic website still attracts traffic.
As of October 2024, the top traffic sources for socratic.org are as follows:
(Source)
Socratic.org doesn’t currently receive any Paid search traffic. (Source)
Socratic is most popular in the United States, where it receives over half of its desktop traffic.
The top five countries sending traffic to the socratic.org website in October 2024 are:
(Source)
Other countries are responsible for the remaining 24.46% of their traffic. (Source)
The socratic.org website receives most of its social media traffic on desktop from YouTube, though Pinterest and Reddit aren’t far behind. (Source)
Here is a breakdown of socratic.org’s top five traffic sources from social media as of October 2024:
(Source)
Other social media platforms make up the remaining 16.52%. (Source)
Since it focuses on helping high school and college students, it's no surprise that socratic.org’s audience is on the younger side. It’s most popular with the 18-24 year age group, and least popular with those 65+. (Source)
Here is the age distribution for socratic.org:
(Source)
Socratic is slightly more popular with those who identify as females in October 2024, making up just over half of its audience. (Source)
Here’s a closer look at the gender breakdown for users accessing socratic.org:
(Source)
As of October 2024, the top keyword worldwide and on desktop for socratic.org is “socratic,” which receives far more organic traffic share than others. (Source)
Here are the top keywords for socratic.org:
(Source)
There are 19.7K others. (Source)
If you’re unhappy with the latest version of Socratic, there are several competitors and similar sites to choose from.
Some of the top Socratic alternatives are:
(Source)
Symbolab, Cuemath, and Desmos specialize in math-related homework help. (Source, Source, and Source)
However, Numerade provides help for college, high school, and graduate-level science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) textbooks. (Source)
Although there’s a lot that we currently know about Socratic, we are missing one key piece of information: what happened to its standalone app.
Google still has the Socratic website up and running, but the tech giant hasn’t updated it since the rumored move to Google Lens. It still even includes the links to download the Socratic app, though they lead nowhere. (Source)
As we wait for Google's comment, it seems that students can use the Google Lens feature for similar homework help.
We’ll update this article with new information once it becomes available.
Looking for more insight into the latest in AI and apps? Check out our statistics guides:
Though we have covered a lot in this article, here are a few of the most frequently asked questions about Socratic.
Google owns Socratic. They announced that they bought the education tech company and its product by the same name in August 2019, though one of the founders reports that Google acquired Socratic back in March 2018. (Source and Source)
After the acquisition, Google re-launched the app in August 2019 and Android in February 2020. (Source)
No, you don’t have to pay to use Socratic. It has always been free for those looking for help with their homework questions. Simply submit your question, let Socratic do its thing, and get access to the most relevant learning materials online, free of charge.
No, Socratic doesn’t write essays or papers. However, this is a good thing.
If a student submits a completely AI-generated paper and tries to pass it off as their own, schools and teachers may consider it cheating.
With AI detectors making it easier than ever to identify AI content and the potential consequences of cheating, submitting an AI-generated essay isn’t worth the risk.
Learn more about Originality.ai for educators.
Socratic isn’t on the Play Store or App Store because, according to Reddit, Socratic was integrated into the Google app.
Though Google hasn’t officially said anything about the move yet, it appears that Socratic users are being directed to use Google Lens instead. It does have a homework feature that seems to be similar to Socratic.
