How to get your own textbook explained to you, out loud
Most textbooks quietly assume a teacher is standing next to you.
Some maths books are worse than that: page after page of questions with no worked
explanation anywhere. This is how to have the page in front of you actually taught.
The problem is not that you cannot read it
You can read the words. What is missing is the person who says
"look at this line, this is the bit that matters, and here is why."
A search engine gives you somebody else's explanation of a topic. A chatbot
gives you a general answer to a general question. Neither one is looking at
your page, with your book's notation, your chapter's assumptions, and
the specific paragraph that stopped you.
What "teach from your book" actually means
Beepsme reads the page that is open on your screen and teaches from it. In practice
that means four things happen together:
It explains a paragraph at a time, rather than summarising
the whole page in one breath and moving on.
It highlights the sentence it is talking about while it talks,
so you never lose your place.
It draws when the words are not enough: a flowchart, a cycle,
a comparison, a labelled geometry figure, a graph, a free body diagram with the
forces actually drawn as arrows.
It speaks, in the language you asked in, so you can keep your
eyes on the book and your hands on your pen.
Doing it, start to finish
Open the page. A PDF, a photo of a page, a scan, a worksheet.
Whatever is genuinely in front of you.
Ask out loud. Say it in the language you want the lesson in.
"Teach me this page."English lesson
مجھے یہ صفحہ پڑھاؤUrdu lesson, same request
Interrupt it. This is the part people do not expect to be
allowed. Say "slower", or "go back", or "I do not understand". It stops what it
is doing, including mid drawing, and comes back to you.
Ask for a picture. Name the shape you want and you get that
shape, not the one it felt like drawing.
"Draw a flowchart of this." · "Make a mind map."
· "Compare these two." · "Make me sticky notes for revision."
A question-only maths book
This is the hardest case and the one worth being precise about. If your book is
nothing but exercises, there is no explanation on the page to read out. So it works
the problem instead: it takes the question in front of you, solves it a step at a
time, says why each step follows from the last, and draws the figure if the question
has one. Then it asks you to try the next one.
What it does not do
It needs an internet connection. The voice models that make
this good enough to listen to live in the cloud. There is no offline mode today.
Windows 10 and 11 only right now. Mac is later, phones after that.
It is a tutor, not an oracle. On a hard quantitative question
it can be wrong, the same way a tutor can be wrong. Check the answer, and ask it
to show the working, which it will.
A quantitative diagram takes a moment. Roughly fifteen seconds
for something like a free body diagram, because getting the numbers right is worth
more than getting a picture fast.
Common questions
Can AI teach me from my own textbook?
Yes. Beepsme reads the page open on your screen and teaches from that page, rather than from its own summary of the topic. That means your book's notation, your chapter's assumptions and the exact paragraph that stopped you, instead of somebody else's explanation of roughly the same subject.
What if my maths book has only questions and no explanations?
Then it works the problem instead of reading the page. It takes the question in front of you, solves it a step at a time, says why each step follows from the last, draws the figure if there is one, and then asks you to try the next question yourself.
Can it draw a diagram of what it is explaining?
Yes, and you choose the shape. Ask for a flowchart, a mind map, a comparison, a labelled geometry figure, a graph or a set of revision sticky notes, and you get the one you named. For a mechanics question it draws the forces as actual arrows rather than boxes.
Which languages can it teach in?
41, including Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Spanish and Swahili. The lesson follows whichever language you ask in, so there is no setting to find first.
See how Beepsme worksBeepsme opens to users shortly. Windows 10 and 11, with a
three day free trial and no card needed at the start.