Merlyn ‘one of the most interesting AI offerings’ from ISTE, says Futuresource

A lot of the conversations at the Merlyn Mind booth at June’s ISTELive edtech conference in Philadelphia started something like this: “I asked my friends what booths I should check out, and they all told me, ‘You have to go meet Merlyn!’"

And our booth was busy! Hundreds and hundreds of teachers, principals, superintendents, academic directors, instructional coordinators, and more stopped by to meet Merlyn, our AI assistant for education.  

We must have hosted a few consultants as well, because Futuresource Consulting’s ISTE 2023 review called Merlyn “one of the most interesting AI offerings of the show.”  

Futuresource has been tracking, researching, and consulting on the global edtech market for more than 15 years. Here’s what they had to say (right after they talked about Microsoft and Google):

‍One of the most interesting AI offerings from the show was from startup company Merlyn Mind, emerging in 2021 with a digital assistant solution for teachers and now bringing to market a Large Language Model especially designed for educators. It differs from traditional LLMs like ChatGPT in that the Merlyn Mind LLM will only extract data from academic corpora chosen by the institutions, minimizing inaccurate and unreliable responses. …

‍The company hopes to help ‘untether’ teachers from their desks, giving them more freedom to interact with students during a lesson. They can then call upon the Merlyn Mind software to perform tasks like answer student questions, quickly pull up documents and presentations, and even generate slideshows (with images and text) for entire topics using generative AI.

ISTE felt like an inflection point for Merlyn Mind, and though our team has been head-down on AI for education for five years, we’re doubly excited that educators are now actively seeking out solutions.  

“Our solutions and approach to AI for education resonated with so many people who visited with us at ISTE,” says Merlyn Mind Chief Strategy Officer Levi Belnap. “In previous years, we were hustling to get attention. This year, we were hustling to keep up with all of the people who wanted to learn about Merlyn. It’s exciting to meet this AI moment with the right solution at the right time.”  

Read more Futuresource insights on edtech here.  

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