How AI Impacts Student learning with École Polytechnique?

Introduction

École Polytechnique produces thousands of documents, courses, and videos every year. Finding the right information and keeping students engaged was getting harder.
They asked Rakam AI to turn this content into three simple, useful AI tools: smarter search, a course companion, and an automatic transcription service.

Rakam AI, working with École Polytechnique’s teams, implemented three concrete solutions:

A. Natural-Language Document Search
Instead of keyword-based search, users ask questions in plain language.
The system finds relevant documents, generates a concise answer, and surfaces the underlying papers or files so students and researchers can verify and explore further.

B. AI Learning Companion for Courses
An in-course chatbot follows the student’s progress and:
•⁠ ⁠Asks questions after each section to reinforce understanding.
•⁠ ⁠Encourages reflection and active recall.
•⁠ ⁠Flags skipped content and suggests going back when a key video or section is missed.

C. Speech-to-Text and Video Summaries
When a user uploads a video, the system:
•⁠ ⁠Transcribes the audio and generates subtitles.
•⁠ ⁠Produces a short written description or summary of the content.
Originally deployed on a local speech model, this pipeline was reworked to run via an API-based model, reducing infrastructure costs while keeping quality and reliability high.

4. Client Testimonial

"The Rakam team is highly competent in knowledge transfer, they know how to explain every development and choice they make to help a company integrate AI solutions... We highly recommend them!"
Bruno, Director of Master at École Polytechnique

The Challenge

Students and researchers at École Polytechnique faced three main issues that matched this project:

•⁠ ⁠Scattered knowledge: Important academic and institutional documents were stored across many tools and formats, making it hard to quickly find the right information.

•⁠ ⁠Passive learning: Courses were mostly linear, offering little interactive support to help students reflect, stay engaged, or revisit key content.

•⁠ ⁠Underused video content: Valuable videos lacked transcripts, subtitles, and summaries, which limited accessibility and reuse.

The Vision

The Outcome

École Polytechnique now has AI tools that make documents easier to find, courses more interactive, and videos more accessible without adding extra workload for teachers or students.