Khanmigo

Khanmigo is Khan Academy's answer to the awkward question every parent and teacher has been asking since ChatGPT arrived: can AI help kids learn without doing the work for them? Built on GPT-4 and wrapped around Khan Academy's course library, it tutors students through math, science, coding, and writing — and it is stubbornly, deliberately unwilling to just hand over answers.

What we like

The pedagogy is the product. Ask Khanmigo to solve an equation and it asks what you think the first step is. The writing coach critiques structure and evidence in a draft rather than rewriting it. Teachers get a genuinely useful free tier: lesson plans, exit tickets, rubrics, and student progress summaries that would otherwise eat an evening. At $4/month for families, it undercuts every human tutoring option by two orders of magnitude, and conversation logs are visible to parents and teachers, which builds real trust.

Where it falls short

Khanmigo only shines inside Khan Academy's walls. If your child's homework doesn't map to Khan content, its context is thin. Like every LLM, it still occasionally fumbles arithmetic mid-explanation, which is an awkward failure mode for a math tutor. And motivated high schoolers who just want a quick answer will find its Socratic patience irritating and go straight back to ChatGPT.

Verdict

For families already using Khan Academy, Khanmigo is close to a no-brainer at $4/month — it's the most responsibly designed AI tutor on the market. Teachers should grab the free tools regardless. If you need a general-purpose homework helper across arbitrary textbooks and subjects, pair it with something broader, but as a safe first AI tutor for a school-age kid, this is the one we'd pick.