I built Xplain because of one of mine.
She asked me something I couldn't answer properly, so I handed her the AI tools I use every day for work. Every single one gave her a wall of text written for a 40-year-old engineer. She read two lines, said "okay," and stopped asking.
That bothered me more than it should have. The models are good enough now. The interface just wasn't built for her. A curious eight-year-old doesn't want a chat window, she wants someone to explain it to her out loud, with pictures, at her level, in her language.
So Xplain turns a kid's question into an actual narrated lesson with illustrations, broken into small steps, pitched at their age. Ask by voice, text, or photo. There's a character called Xplore who crashed on Earth and needs their questions to refuel his ship home, which turns out to be a much better motivator than a progress bar.
I'm Tarek, Founder and CEO of Xplain AI.
This started on a highway. I was driving my three daughters to another city, and Nelly, my nine-year-old, kept watching the heat shimmer ahead of us look like water and vanish. She asked me why. My answer wasn't good enough. She asked if she could ask the AI.
In our house kids don't use AI unsupervised, so I said yes on one condition: I hold the phone.
Round one, she asks whether it's a mirage, and the model hears "marriage" in her fast nine-year-old voice. Her sisters lose it. She goes quiet.
Round two, I re-record it myself. Now it's correct: refractive gradients, superheated air near the road. A great answer for a 37-year-old engineer. She hands the phone back after two lines.
Round three, I add "she's nine." It swings to cheerful and hollow, and she can tell she's being handled.
Round four, I ask for something she can picture. The straw that looks broken in a glass of water. She gets it, and spends twenty minutes hunting fake puddles on the road.
The product came from the three failures, not the answer. It took a parent in the car and four rounds of prompting. On her own, Nelly stops at round one and learns something worse than optics: that this isn't for her.
So we built Xplain AI to get it right the first time.
- Ask in 70+ languages, by voice, text, or a photo of the thing you're pointing at
- Answers in Arabic and English for now, more coming
- Every lesson narrated, illustrated, and broken into bite-sized steps
- Gamified: leaderboards, squads, 1v1 challenges
- A lesson bank built for the child's age and culture, not translated from someone else's
- Free to explore, learn, and ask
- iOS and Android, plus a web interface for browsing existing lessons with no signup at all
One more thing. Kids don't stay for a curriculum, they stay for someone they care about. So all of it is wrapped in a story. Xplore comes from planet Xplain, and his rocket ran out of knowledge fuel and crashed here on Earth. He can't leave without more of it, and the only place it comes from is a curious kid asking a question. Every "why" refuels the ship. Nelly doesn't think she's learning optics. She thinks she's helping a friend get home.
Would love your feedback, especially from parents. What's the question your kid asked that you couldn't answer?