Google has been trying hard for years to come up with useful ways to use AI, and they have developed two of them – NotebookLM and Google Storybook.

Their latest AI experiment, Learn Everything, is actually a pretty cool idea – take a picture of something you want to learn about and, in theory, it will immediately create an illustrated slideshow explaining it.

For example, I took a photo of my pen, and it created this slideshow explaining how pens work.  I had even asked it to explain it using language a Beginning English Language Learner could understand – it ended up doing it in language accessible to a high Intermediate/low Intermediate ELL.

Really, the only thing that would distinguish this tool from any AI chatbot would be if Learn Everything could come up with illustrations that helped explain the topic.  Here, it failed miserably.  Though it’s images were cool-looking, they didn’t really offer the reader any help in understanding the text.

I gave it one last chance to convince me of its usefulness by taking a picture of a pen and asking it to use the image to create an English lesson for Beginners (I had seen an app that did this), and it told me it couldn’t do that.

Oh, well….