Digital library Perlego unveils new AI researcher tool

Digital library Perlego has unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) researcher tool, which it says will "revolutionise" the way students learn. 

The new tool, AI Researcher, enables users to enter a query, in response to which it suggests relevant books and excerpts. It is said to use contextual understanding – so the search engine understands the meaning behind a query – in order to source a "range of perspectives" from across Perlego’s library. 

The company said: “Perlego’s subscription unlocks unlimited access to every book on the platform, enhanced further with read-aloud [and] study features, and accessibility functionality.

“AI Researcher goes a step further while upholding academic integrity and mitigating fears publishers have about their content being used for training AI models. Where semantic search had previously connected learners with books based on their metadata such as title and synopsis, AI Researcher enhances the experience by using AI technology to surface specific extracts from a range of the most useful books.”     

Matt Davis, Perlego co-founder and chief technology officer, said: “The biggest challenge was to enable this type of AI-powered semantic search across such an enormous database of textbooks. No out-of-the-box tech could easily handle the level of processing and querying across such a scale. We developed a proprietary solution to solve this challenge.”  

Gauthier Van Malderen, the digital library’s co-founder and chief executive, commented: “Working closely with higher education institutions has enabled us to keep in touch with key educational principles. We’ll continue to partner with the educational community to ensure we meet the needs of learners while upholding academic ideals. This isn’t about helping students short-cut their learning, we’ve always been about making education more accessible through technology.”  

Perlego acquires content by working closely with publishers and said it is engaging with them to combat plagiarism concerns. Sue Hodgson, vice president of content at Perlego, said: “It’s important to note that publishers’ content has not been sent to training models or third-party AI tools to enable this feature. We are not using data to train models or generate new content, which goes directly against one of our core missions, to ensure publishers and therefore authors get compensated fairly for their content.”  

Perlego is an online learning library that provides unlimited access to more than one million books through a subscription model, working with both individual learners and educators, as well as over 200 higher education institutions and organisations globally.

In 2022 it raised $50m (£38.2m) to help accelerate its growth globally.