Kyron Learning

Put People First

• Kyron has centered the student experience in its research and design. The company has sought to build a tool that can meet students where they are, simulating aspects of a 1:1 tutoring experience in a safe, controlled way.
• Notably, Kyron states that it is not trying to replace human teachers with simulated ones. Instead, the tool puts teachers and their expertise at the core of the platform, with the goal of bringing great teachers and instruction to more students.
• Kyron has implemented social and emotional check-ins to assess how the students are feeling about the lessons.
• While many of the latest interactive AI tools rely on generative AI methods that can be difficult to fully control and trust, Kyron's choice of AI method ensures more reliable content management. Kyron's recordings of teachers determine the lesson delivery, the questions posed, and the system's responses to student answers.
• Kyron has not yet released information detailing which student profiles the tool is most or least effective for. The team is currently conducting effectiveness studies with pilot schools.

Be Effective

• Kyron is conducting ongoing effectiveness studies that have shown positive results. According to Kyron, 75% of students give Kyron the highest rating, 93% of teachers would recommend it to other teachers, and very early measurements saw an 18% jump in the number of students who understood the content after the lesson vs. before the lesson.
• Kyron has thoroughly involved expert teachers in the product development process. Educators were hired to develop content and lead the product's design.
• As use of Kyron grows, it will be essential to evaluate its ability to strike a balance between acknowledging a learner's need for support and ensuring they don't feel underestimated.

Prioritize Fairness

• Kyron ensures consistency and equality by providing identical responses to students for the same questions or errors.
• Kyron has been intentional about diverse representation in its roster of teachers. Students can select their desired teacher, broadening their exposure to educators beyond their usual experiences. The adage "if you can see it, you can be it" is well supported by research, emphasizing the importance of representation in fostering inclusion and a sense of belonging.
• Kyron has addressed the known challenges of speech recognition and NLP (see below) by working with a diverse set of schools across the U.S. This has helped the company to understand the different ways in which answers are expressed and update its models accordingly.
• Speech recognition technology can be very difficult to get right, especially for those whose speech isn't recognized by the product. When AI speech-recognition models don't recognize diverse speech patterns like accents or dialects, it can lead to errors, or "false negatives." The converse, "false positives," can also happen, which in this case means the speech recognition model could recognize a word as correct when it was not. While both of these could hamper accuracy and make the technology less reliable, false negatives for Kyron can also amplify unfair biases. More so than adults, children's language structures and patterns vary, and they often have inaccurate articulation. If the system cannot comprehend them, it won't function as designed, potentially hindering their learning.
• Even with a massive amount of speech data, it's a huge challenge to align any speech recognition model across the almost endless variation that exists in spoken language.
• As Kyron's user base grows, it may become more difficult for the product's speech recognition to keep up with the additional variations in language.

Help People Connect

• Given that Kyron is restricted to specific, prerecorded lessons, it is unlikely that learners will become addicted to the tool or encounter harmful content.
• While we have real concerns about users developing parasocial relationships with a chatbot and believing it to be a genuine companion, the "bond" that students have been observed to form with their chosen teacher(s) in Kyron's video library can be a strong benefit. This is because the interaction is responsibly constrained to the pre-recorded video lessons, and the simulated interaction between actual humans supports an engaging learning environment.
• For learners, Kyron is designed to be a one-on-one AI tutor, so it does not directly support or encourage kids to connect with others.

Be Trustworthy

• The Kyron team has demonstrated use of multidisciplinary research in its product development, drawing insights from learning science, educators, technologists, researchers, parents, students, and direct, ongoing classroom observations.
• Having an external expert assessment will be important when it comes to measuring how well Kyron works, for whom, and under what conditions.

Use Data Responsibly

• Kyron's data collection and handling policies emphasize the protection of personally identifiable information (PII). For example, the company uses anonymized, de-identified data for AI model training.
• It's essential to understand that each person's unique speech data is personally identifiable information (PII) and cannot be entirely anonymized. However, Kyron's interaction methods prompt students for specific answers to specific questions, which minimizes the amount of PII likely to be vocalized into the system.

This review is distinct from Common Sense's privacy evaluations and ratings, which evaluate privacy policies to help parents and educators make sense of the complex policies and terms related to popular tools used in homes and classrooms across the country.

Keep Kids & Teens Safe

• Kyron is designed specifically for young learners, keeping AI safety at the forefront. The content that students see is entirely human-generated and determined, which essentially eliminates the possibility of outputting harmful content to the student. The role of AI is limited to determining which piece of content to display at a particular time.
• When students gain confidence in educational material, especially subjects or concepts that had been previously challenging, the impact to their mental health has been shown to be positive.
• Student anxiety is one of the most significant mental health concerns that teachers currently face. Should Kyron's AI system misunderstand students or present lessons that do not match a student's need, classroom teachers may be led to believe a student is struggling with the material when they are actually struggling with the system itself. This could have the effect of increasing student anxiety, whether about using Kyron or belief in their own capabilities. This stress can be exacerbated if a teacher, based on these reports, tells a student they're underperforming. This issue can be addressed with proper teacher training and clear guidelines on how to interpret and act upon progress reports.

Be Transparent & Accountable

• Kyron has close relationships with schools for monitoring feedback, and manually tests how videos are delivered and sequenced based on student interactions.
• Kyron has not yet provided transparency reporting, which would provide insight into its internal assessments regarding performance and fairness, as well as details about its pedagogical approach.