Vigorously educate what I once wanted to do, and I succeeded in doing it with bean buns

Wen| Top Words on FunTalk Liang Yanlin‍‍ 

During the Spring Festival this year, colleagues traveled abroad and inevitably had to eat in restaurants. In the past, she thought this was the most troublesome part. Anyone who looked at the foreign menu was confused. It was enough to announce the names of the dishes, but they even included the ingredient list.

Friends who are familiar with this colleague all know that she is very poor in foreign languages and belongs to the type who is addicted to food. She used to order like a blind person and an elephant. Later, with a dictionary, she finally learned the ropes and took a photo and uploaded it. The mobile phone screen looks like a high-tech device, and then clicks on text extraction, and then a poorly translated photo appears, but at least it works.

But the situation has improved a lot this year, at least that’s what she said. According to her, this year she mainly uses bean buns. Upload a menu and bean buns will tell you first that this is a wine list, and then list the wines on the menu in categories.

It cannot be said that bean buns are much better than Youdao, but at least they are no worse than Youdao. This caused my colleague to have a question: If you have bean buns in your mobile phone, do you still need a dictionary?

She simply typed Chardonnay in the bean bun without saying that she wanted to translate at all. The bean bun told her that it was called Chardonnay in Chinese.

This incident reminds me of a somewhat ancient project. Byte’s education business Dali Education was only three or four years ago. This company, with Dali’s creed of miracles, once spent a lot of money to knock on the education industry. The door, but although Dali made a noise, it did not usher in a miracle. It ended on the first day of double reduction.

There is no denying that education is something Byte has always wanted to do. As early as 2016, Zhang Yiming once proposed that cooperation between technology companies and educational institutions is an inevitable trend, and this is the optimal combination of technology and data. Indeed, the chain and byte traffic model of this industry have a combination of genes.

Secondly, education is indeed a high-margin industry. It is hard to say that it is not regrettable to lose its strength.

But today, the birth of doubao seems to be the reopening of some narratives. At least in educational settings, it has not only begun to replace Youdao dictionaries, but also begun to replace photo search questions. Some people may say that this is no big deal. In China’s IT consumption habits, tool products have never occupied a place, but you should know that for many education companies, these tool products are not cash flow valves, but they are important flow inlets and customer reservoirs.

Today, bytes hit again. Are these reservoirs okay?

01

Recently, how to memorize words using ai has become a hot topic on various social software.

We tried it on bean buns and found that as long as we take a photo of the word list and send it to bean buns, set prompt, and please help me recite the words in the word list, it can immediately generate multiple choice questions, reading comprehension, cloze and other questions based on the uploaded words.

However, there are still certain obstacles in dictation. Doubao seems to be unable to understand the concept of time. It can only read the words in one sitting.

When we told him to read the next word every 15 seconds, it actually inserted Chinese language between the two words every 15 seconds. Later, we changed it to pause and silence. It just mechanically changed the Chinese words, which made people scold it. At that time, it was like a boyfriend who had done something wrong but would only be cute but would not correct it.

Of course, no matter what, at least in this function, bean buns are much better than deepseek, because deepseek cannot take photos and upload them at all.

Now that we can take photos and upload them, our thoughts are open. My colleague, a child’s parent who once worked hard for three hours to solve a fifth-grade elementary school Olympic math problem, finally lost when his child was in the sixth grade.

She took a photo of an application question and uploaded it to Doubao. The other person understood her meaning almost instantly and immediately replied to her ideas for solving the problem, even reminding the small holes in the steps.

This function is not new. As we all know, many years ago, China already had photo search software. Whether it is Xiao Ape search or homework help, it has penetrated into the majority of students and parents. However, when AI software such as bean buns completed the Normandy landing of national mobile phones, there was a question and these search software were okay?

After all, compared with professional search software, AI is too omniscient. In educational scenarios alone, it can not only help you translate, memorize words, take photos to search for questions, but also complete more complex education.

For example, parents can ask ai tools such as bean buns to help generate a set of ultimate secret papers for mathematics or English, Chinese and other subjects in Haidian District based on their child’s grade. We can remind ai of the questions and the number of questions they need to ask according to our own needs, and let it attach answers and detailed analysis. We found that these ai software can not only quickly generate corresponding exercises in a few seconds, but also provide personalized training based on students ‘feedback on wrong questions.

In the process of continuous interaction with AI, it can even identify each student’s weaknesses based on their past problem-solving situation, thereby providing more targeted learning strategies, which are difficult for teachers and parents to do. It is also impossible for traditional online education platforms known as a million question banks and tens of millions of question banks.

AI can also provide students with a lot of help in writing and reading. It can help students correct grammatical errors. Before reading some books, AI can help us sort out our ideas and sort out the key points.

For example, we can type in bean buns, please explain the book “Dream of the Red Chamber” in a simple and easy-to-understand way, including its core concepts and arguments. We can even ask ai in software such as gitmind to help us generate the character relationship mind map of Dream of the Red Chamber. As long as the instructions are clearly expressed, we can get the answer we want in basically a few seconds.

In addition, it can also provide you with work assistance and make travel plans, ranging from a recipe to a review of a paper. The frequency and time of use will quickly manifest into the Matthew effect. When you are in trouble, you will open the bean buns. Who would think of the little ape?

02

Trust me, this is not a groundless worry, but a dilemma that Chegg, one of the world’s largest online education platforms, is currently experiencing. This software, similar to the American Homework Help, was the first choice to assist American students with homework before the advent of chatgpt.

But with the rise of ai technology, many students are turning to ai tools such as chatgpt because they are free and easy to use. Using Chegg not only requires a monthly fee of US$19.95, but the answers are also written in advance in textbooks. The loss of users caused Chegg to experience a net loss of US$831 million in the first three quarters of 2024, and also caused its share price to fall 99% from the beginning of 2021.

Of course, in the China market, tool software usually cannot generate revenue through subscriptions, as has always been the case. Therefore, whether it is a dictionary, a monkey search question, or an homework gang, when they are also affected by the AI wave, their income will not be affected too much in the short term.

But this does not mean that their business will not be subtracted by AI. Because both question banks and dictionaries are tools for these companies to achieve low-cost online drainage, and have long assumed the role of customer reservoirs.

Take ape counseling as an example. When most online education platforms are striving for teachers and enrollment, ape counseling cuts into the child’s practice. It has attracted a large number of users by continuously accumulating and optimizing question bank resources, and has developed Little Monkey Search Questions and other important products. The development path of Homework Gang is basically the same. Tool software has helped these companies complete large-scale user education and mental training.

Of course, in order to complete the business closed-loop, these companies have gradually entered the online large-class market in the later period. The proportion of question bank in the entire group’s business is not too high, especially before the double reduction, in order to obtain a large number of customers in the short term, almost all leading companies have placed their main customer acquisition channels on Short Video platforms such as Douyin, but the role of the question bank has been reduced.

This has also pushed up the business costs of the industry for a long time. Mi Wenjuan, founder and CEO of VIPKID, once said that VIPKID’s single customer acquisition cost reaches an average of 4000 yuan. Even Dali Education, which had a high-profile end at that time, was no exception. Since traffic costs required internal settlement, in fact, although Dali Education had a good father, he could not survive the marketing war alone. Before the business line was closed, Dali Education had never run through the profit model, which was also an important reason why Dali Education’s business line was shut down as soon as possible after the double reduction.

By July 2021, the double reduction policy was officially introduced and implemented. A series of star and non-star online education companies, including Dali Education and VIPKID, suddenly disappeared. In fact, for those companies that still remained at the table, the turning point appeared instead.

Because online education advertising has been restricted, people have begun to think about other drainage paths, and the role of tool products will obviously be enhanced, because users who register and use these tool products are very accurate.

On the home page of Youdao Dictionary APP, there is a conspicuous course entrance. The situation of Xiao Yuan’s search questions is more complicated because a large number of its users are students and parents in the K9 stage. According to regulations, online education courses for subject types at the K9 stage need to be carried out in a non-profit manner. Therefore, in Xiao Yuan’s search questions, the course entrance at the K9 stage is more hidden and requires users to scan the code for consultation.

03

The good times will not last long. With the popularity of AI software and the return of ByteDance and other technology giants to the online education track, in addition to bean buns, Tencent Yuanbao has also advertised in the circle of friends, claiming that they can complete English practice partners online.

The difficulty of competition in this market has been increased. Educational resources are once again facing the situation of integration and redistribution, and the customer acquisition reservoirs formed by these online education platforms through free learning tools such as question banks and dictionaries are also directly impacted by ai tools such as bean bags and kimi, making the difficulty of acquiring customers instantly raised.

Traditional online education platforms regard these question bank data and teaching resources as their lifeblood, but in the eyes of these AI tools, they are just feed for training models. So for these online education platforms, the immediate problem is how to embrace the ai wave and rebuild their core competitiveness and customer acquisition model, rather than becoming fuel for the new era.

At least on the public level, various education companies have shown enthusiasm for embracing AI.

Zhou Feng, CEO of Netease Youdao, once expressed his opinion on how to deeply integrate traditional online education platforms with ai. He felt that ai technology could add more functions and value to educational products and services, that is, using ai to add education.

For example, Netease once launched version 2.0 of the education model Ziyue, which uses ai technology to achieve comprehensive upgrades in oral dialogue capabilities, knowledge question and answer capabilities, and word processing, which greatly improves the accuracy of model answers. Subsequently, Netease successively released three AI applications: Xiao P Teacher, Youdao Speed Reading, and Virtual Human Oral Private Teaching Hi Echo 2.0, which further expanded the scope of ai’s application in educational scenarios.

Just like Zhou Feng said: When the wave of big technology comes, you should participate as quickly as possible. Start working first. Speed is very important. Netease Youdao does indeed do the same, constantly integrating various ai applications with educational scenarios in depth., using ai to add education.

But isn’t this really not singing the back court flowers across the river?

After all, ai’s role is not just to add to education empowerment, it can also subtract from education companies by simplifying originally complex processes and reducing labor costs.

Of course, it can also be said that this is another addition. When the low-cost drainage path achieved through tool products becomes narrower and narrower, it is very likely that everyone will return to the arms of Douyin.” nbsp;