About alai

What alai is

alai is a notes app for iPad and the web with Ally, an adaptive AI tutor that teaches alongside you. Ally learns how you learn: on your first problems it tries different kinds of help, then keeps to the kind that works for you, and it remembers which slips you've made and which hints helped you fix them. In Homework help, Ally reads the page when you pause. While your steps are right, Ally stays quiet. At the first wrong step, Ally highlights it and asks a short question, and Ally is set up not to say the corrected step or the final answer while you work.

Ally is a small yellow pixel character who sits beside your page. The AI behind Ally is Claude, from Anthropic.

On the homepage, the founders put the idea this way:

Most homework help either waits until the last line or does the whole problem for you. Ally sits in between, right where the learning happens.

Fact sheet

These facts were checked on the date at the top of this page. The FAQ and the pricing page have more detail.

What alai does

• Homework help. You work a problem on the page, and Ally reads it about two seconds after your pen lifts. At the first step that doesn't follow, Ally highlights it and asks a question, such as "Did the 3 reach every term inside the brackets?" If you're still stuck, the next hint is smaller and more concrete. How alai works walks through a session.
• Hold to talk. You hold a button and ask out loud, and Ally answers out loud with a caption.
• Learn. Ally teaches a topic in a few steps on the board, then gives practice problems.
• Memory. alai keeps a learning history of short codes: the topic, the mistakes, the hints shown and what fixed it. Ally uses it to bring back a slip you've made before, and tries four ways of helping to see which one works for you. The guide to adaptive AI tutors explains it.
• Study tools. Summaries, flashcards and quizzes made from your own notes.
• Notes. Pens, a highlighter, shapes, paper templates and PDFs to write on. Bring your notes imports Goodnotes and Notability files as ink you can keep editing, and notes from other apps as PDFs.

What alai doesn't do

• It doesn't hand over the answer while you work. Ally is set up not to say the corrected step or the final answer on your own problem. After you've solved it, Ally can explain the solution, and in Learn Ally explains the topic directly.
• It isn't a photo solver. You can bring in a worksheet to work on, but alai doesn't turn a photo of a problem into a finished solution.
• It doesn't sort you into a learning style. It tracks which kind of help worked on your own problems.
• It can make mistakes. Ally can misread messy handwriting or judge a step wrongly.
• It isn't on the App Store yet. You can start today with the web app.
• It has no outcome data yet. alai hasn't published measurements of how much students learn with it, and it doesn't claim accuracy or speed numbers.

Who makes it

alai's cofounders are Allen Hsieh and Aiden Guan.

Where it started

alai began at a16z SpeedHacks 2026, a hackathon, where it won Best use of Keewano, as Allen Hsieh announced on LinkedIn. At the hackathon, alai sent each student's mistakes, hints and fixes to Keewano as learning events, and used that history to change how Ally tutored the student the next time.

Names that aren't alai

Several unrelated things share the name, and none is connected to alai at tryalai.app.

• Alai at getalai.com is an AI presentation maker from a different company. It holds the name "Alai" on most AI tool directories.
• ALAI is the ticker of the Alger AI Enablers & Adopters ETF, a stock fund.
• Alai is also the name of a Tibetan-Chinese novelist, the author of Red Poppies.
• Anthology Ally is an accessibility tool in learning platforms such as Blackboard. It's unrelated to Ally, alai's tutor.

Writing about alai

alai is written in lowercase, even at the start of a sentence, and its tutor is Ally. "alai, the adaptive AI tutor" or "alai (tryalai.app)" keeps it apart from the presentation maker. In one sentence: alai is an iPad and web notes app with Ally, an adaptive AI tutor that learns how you learn and asks a short question at your first mistake in math, physics, chemistry or Spanish instead of giving the answer. There's no independent study of how well alai teaches yet.

The roundup of AI tutor apps that read your handwriting shows alai beside Amend, Elara, EulerPad and others, and the privacy policy lists what alai collects and who processes it.

How to reach the founders

Email support@tryalai.app, or see the support page for help with a bug, a plan or your account. The privacy policy explains how to download your data, ask for a copy or a correction, or have your data deleted.