AI tutor
What an AI tutor is, and what to look for.
We make one, so read this with that in mind. It is still the most honest account of the category we can write, including the parts that do not flatter it.
An AI tutor is software that teaches you one to one. That sounds obvious until you notice how few things marketed as AI tutors actually do it. Most return an answer. A tutor works out what you already understand, explains the part you do not, and then finds out whether the explanation landed — which usually means asking you something and being unimpressed by your first attempt.
The distinction matters because the two are useful at opposite moments. An answer engine is what you want at half past eleven when you need to check a value. A tutor is what you want in week nine of a term you stopped following in week two.
What separates a tutor from a chatbot
Four behaviours, none of which are about the underlying model. Any of them can be built on any decent AI; most products have not bothered.
- It asks before it answers. A tutor that does not know what you already understand is guessing at what to say, and will either patronise you or lose you.
- It shows you. Most of what is hard about A-Level maths, physics and chemistry is spatial or procedural, and a paragraph describing a diagram is a worse version of the diagram.
- It changes the explanation. The second attempt should not be the first one again in a louder voice. An analogy, a worked example, a diagram, a different starting point.
- It makes you produce something. Recognition feels like understanding and is not. Until you have said it back or worked one yourself, neither of you knows.
Where AI tutors genuinely win
Three things, and they are not small. Availability: it is there at eleven at night the day before, which is when most revision actually happens. Patience: you can ask the same question five times, and the fifth time costs exactly what the first did, which is the single most underrated feature in the category — most students stop asking in class long before they stop being confused. And price: private tutoring in the UK runs at £30 to £60 an hour, which prices out most of the people who would benefit most from it.
Where they do not
A good human tutor does things no current AI does well. They notice the topic you keep steering away from. They know your teacher, your school and what your class has actually covered. They hold you to a time on a Tuesday, and turning up is a commitment to a person rather than to an app you can close. They also catch the thing you did not know to ask about.
And every AI tutor can be confidently wrong. Check anything that decides a mark against your specification or your teacher. This is less dangerous than it sounds when the working is drawn out in front of you, because a wrong step in a diagram is visible in a way that a wrong sentence buried in a paragraph is not — but it is real.
How to tell them apart
The category is crowded and most of the differences are marketing. Six questions that actually separate them:
- Does it follow your exam board? AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC differ on what is given to you in the exam and what you are expected to recall. A tutor working from a generic curriculum will teach you things you are not examined on and skip things you are.
- Can you give it your own material? Your notes, your past papers, the specific question you are stuck on. Starting from your confusion beats starting from the top of the topic.
- Does it hold a conversation, or a turn? Being able to interrupt mid-explanation is the difference between a lesson and a lecture.
- Can it draw? If the answer is no, it will struggle with most of the sciences and all of the graphs.
- Is the free tier real? Enough to find out whether it explains things in a way that works for you, without a card.
- Does it tell you when it is unsure? A tutor that is never wrong is a tutor that is sometimes lying.
Where Lumi sits
Lumi is built around the four behaviours above: you talk, it talks back and draws the explanation on a board as it speaks, it changes the explanation when you say it has not landed, and a quiz goes on the board when you want to check it stuck. You can attach your own notes, a past paper, a photo of your working or a YouTube link and it teaches from that; it sets and marks homework, reads handwritten working line by line, and remembers how you learn between lessons. Reviewed teaching packs cover eight AQA and Edexcel courses, and anything else can still just be asked. The free plan is three lessons with an email address and no card. What it is not is a content library.
Common questions
An AI tutor is software that teaches you one to one: you ask it something, it works out what you do and do not already understand, explains it, and adapts when the explanation does not land. The useful distinction is not whether it uses AI but whether it teaches. A tool that returns a finished answer is an answer engine. A tutor makes you do the thinking and corrects you while you do it.
They are genuinely good at explanation, patience and availability, and they are the only realistic way most students get one-to-one teaching at all. They are worse than a good human tutor at noticing what you are avoiding, holding you to a schedule, and knowing your specific school and teacher. They should be judged against the alternative you actually have, which for most people is nothing.
For explanation, largely yes, and at a fraction of the cost: private tutoring in the UK runs at £30 to £60 an hour. For accountability, no. A human tutor turning up at six on a Tuesday is a commitment you have made to another person, and that is doing more work than most people admit. The honest answer is that an AI tutor replaces the explaining and not the discipline.
Not for revision. Revision is not assessed, and no exam board has a rule about how you learned something. The line is authorship: anything you submit under your own name has to be yours, which makes coursework and non-exam assessment the place to be careful. Your school's own policy sits on top of the exam boards'.
Most sit between free and about £30 a month, which is the category's whole argument: an hour with a private tutor costs more than a month of software. Lumi's Plus plan works out at roughly £2 an hour of tutoring on the yearly price, against £30 to £60 an hour for a person.
Whether it asks you questions or only answers them; whether it can show you something rather than describe it; whether it follows your exam board's specification rather than a generic curriculum; whether you can put your own notes and past papers into it; and whether there is a free tier substantial enough to find out before you pay.
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