Sophomore Sarthak Dhawan is looking to make studying easier for students through his start-up TurboLearn AI.
TurboLearn AI allows students to record lectures to generate AI summaries, flashcards and quizzes, as well as receive AI-generated answers to questions about their notes. The learning tool, founded almost a year ago, now has approximately 500,000 users — according to Dhawan — and nearly 60,000 followers on Instagram.
On the Apple App Store, TurboLearn is rated 58th in educational apps and averages 4.8 out of five stars.
“The most enjoyable thing in my job is just seeing a random person using my product in the wild,” he said.
To Dhawan, TurboLearn AI enables students to actively listen to their professors during lectures rather than trying to multitask and take notes.
“We want you to learn faster. We want you to learn better,” Dhawan said.
He recalled always having an interest in using AI to augment learning, even before the introduction of tools like ChatGPT.
Dhawan stated that TurboLearn was able to grow to such heights because of “guerilla marketing techniques,” an unconventional and youth-focused advertising approach that includes humor and an active social media presence.
He said his technical background in coding comes from creating other startups, including a mobile app he created in his first year of high school. He also recently spent a gap semester working on a startup in San Francisco.
TurboLearn relies on an AI model that is optimized for transcribing recordings. After the lecture is transcribed, a separate large language model converts the transcript into notes.
“We're not taking any outside context … everything that's in your notes is taken from the lecture,” he said.
Dhawan noted that TurboLearn AI has a free version which enables two hours of recorded lecture content per month, as well as premium versions which enable expanded use.
The University allows individual faculty to make AI rules in their syllabi independently, but it is unclear how University policies apply more broadly to tools like TurboLearn.
“AI gets a lot of hate — a lot of unjustified hate, in my opinion — specifically in education as a means to circumvent the existing rules, policies and work,” he said. “I don’t see it that way … AI can be incredibly powerful to learn as well.”
TurboLearn AI encourages students to get consent from their professors before recording and follow all specific guidelines professors or universities may set.
According to Dhawan, TurboLearn AI also has contracts with specific universities that purchase the tool for their students to use. The organization’s largest contract is with Meharry Medical College, a historically Black, private medical school in Nashville, Tennessee.
Dhawan hopes to initiate conversations with the University and faculty about supporting the use of TurboLearn AI in the classroom.
Looking to the future, Dhawan plans to continue expanding TurboLearn.
“We're adding new features, fixing bugs [and] talking to customers … trying to make it as big as humanly possible,” he said.
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Dylan Halper is a Trinity first-year and a staff reporter for the news department.