1,000 Teachers in Buryatia Get Prepodavatel Assistant
SberObrazovanie’s service helps teachers plan lessons, analyze classes and save hours of routine work, giving them more time to create and inspire.
The system is built on GigaChat and Salute Speech technologies. It gives teachers at 53 schools in Buryatia access to three modules. The first is an AI assistant that helps develop lessons, create individualized plans and generate assignments for students at different levels of preparation. There is also a quiz builder that lets teachers upload text and turn it into interactive material for reviewing or reinforcing topics. But perhaps the most impressive feature is lesson analytics. That deserves a closer look.
When Teachers Reflect
Here is how the system works. A teacher records a class on a phone or voice recorder and uploads the audio file to the service, where a neural network converts the speech to text. The system then analyzes the lesson using 16 to 17 metrics. It looks at everything from how class time is allocated and which teaching methods are used to the emotional tone of the teacher’s speech and even the level of student engagement. Based on that data, the teacher receives an objective report that helps identify strengths and areas for growth, reflect on their own teaching and make future lessons more effective. The smart Prepodavatel Assistant (Teacher Assistant) was developed in partnership with leading research institutions, including the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg State University and Moscow City University.
For Buryatia, where about 40% of schools have small enrollments, the project is particularly important. Teachers in rural schools often have to teach subjects outside their primary field, and Prepodavatel Assistant can serve as a responsive teaching aid. It helps them prepare high-quality materials on any topic.
“Our main goal is to improve the quality of education so that after school, our children have the opportunity to enroll at any university and are prepared for life. We are trying to use every tool available to achieve that,” explains Alexey Tsydenov, head of Buryatia.
But the project goes beyond generating lesson outlines. According to Valery Pozdnyakov, Buryatia’s minister of education and science, the main goal is to expand what teachers can do: “While basic lesson materials are fully available through the federal Moya shkola (My School) information system, Sber’s service allows teachers to explore a topic in greater depth and helps them answer difficult, unconventional questions from students that go beyond the textbook.”
No Longer an Experiment
SberObrazovanie launched Prepodavatel Assistant in April 2024. Even then, the system could transcribe lessons and provide feedback, with GigaChat and Salute Speech serving as its technological foundation.
Over the following year, the service was piloted across multiple regions, and by April 2025 it had been added to Russia’s software registry. By mid-2025, more than 30,000 teachers across 30 Russian regions were using Prepodavatel Assistant at 1,200 schools, as well as at 60 universities and colleges. In 2024 and 2025, the service was piloted in Yakutia and the Sverdlovsk and Kaluga regions, where hundreds and thousands of teachers incorporated it into their work. By 2026, the service had more than 150,000 users across 62 Russian regions. That accumulated experience made it possible to move from pilots to systematic deployment, as Buryatia is doing now.
The project has received several professional awards, including Obrazovatelny proekt goda (Educational Project of the Year) and Servis goda (Service of the Year).
Learning From Each Other
The first phase of the project in Buryatia will end in March 2027, but regional authorities are already planning to continue the partnership. One of the project’s most sought-after goals is to establish direct feedback from teachers. That would allow SberObrazovanie’s developers to refine the product and adapt it to schools’ needs. In effect, this creates a kind of mutual learning process in which the teacher trains the neural network, while the neural network helps train the teacher.
The agreement between Buryatia and SberObrazovanie provides 1,000 accounts with access to the service. The project costs 1 million rubles (about $12,000). But success will be measured by more than the number of accounts connected. The metrics will include, for example, how many hours of routine work teachers save and how actively they use the service in their everyday practice. Most important, however, is how engaged students become when they have two mentors: a human teacher and that teacher’s trusted Prepodavatel Assistant.
