China's state textbook publisher has turned the actual schoolbooks into an AI tutor — and one company's tablet gets it first
On 21 August the audio-visual and digital arm of the People's Education Press, whose textbooks are the standard issue in Chinese schools, signed an agreement with Xiaoyuan to build a "textbook learning agent" from the licensed book content, running on Xiaoyuan's language model. It launched the same day on the company's AI study tablet, which becomes the first piece of hardware permitted to carry it. The agent has two modes: one turns the static pages into animated scenes and answers questions as the pupil reads, the other plans a path through the material grade by grade and subject by subject in one-to-one lessons built on the national curriculum standard. The companies say a pilot that began in March with more than 100,000 primary pupils raised knowledge-point mastery by 33.6 percent in Chinese and 24 percent in English. Those figures are the companies' own; no independent study has been published.
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