Microsoft Research India and teams across Microsoft have jointly launched the project ‘Siksha copilot’ that targets enhancing learning outcomes and empowering teachers to build more comprehensive, age-appropriate lesson plans combining the best online resources available, including textbooks, videos, classroom activities and assessment tools as per their official website.   

According to the experts, teachers worldwide witness challenges. Challenges like time management, classroom organisation and developing effective lesson plans are common universal challenges.   

The field experts suggest that the advancement in AI enables new opportunities to improve the abilities of teachers and empower students to learn more effectively. That is the main aim of a new project from Microsoft Research that uses the power of generative AI to assist teachers in quickly creating personalised learning experiences, designing assignments, hands-on activities and many more while returning the hours of time that they spend on daily planning now.   

The project also aims to assist in curating resources like an AI-powered digital assistant, which revolves around the specific needs of teachers, which were identified at the start through various interviews and workshops by curating the best available online resources, said the statement.   

Akshay Nambi, principal researcher of Microsoft Research, mentioned, “Shiksha copilot includes a range of powerful features that address those challenges and enhance the educational experience. It’s grounded in specific curricula and learning objectives to ensure that all generated content aligns with desired educational outcomes.” He further added, “This grounding is enabled by ingesting relevant data with the help of state-of-the-art optical character recognition (OCR), computer vision (CV) and generative AI models. It was also important to use natural language and support voice-based interactions while including options for English and Kannada speakers.”   

As per reports, officials claim that the copilot is being developed for Project VeLLM (Universal Empowerment with Large Language Models) at Microsoft Research India. The aim of VeLLM is to develop inclusive and accessible copilots that are available and accessible to everyone by creating a platform for developing population-scale copilots.