Sber Opens the Door to an AI-Powered Learning Universe With Free Education Tools
The new experimental services let users build learning courses, discuss books they have read with AI, and put together presentations.
Sber’s DISRUPT team, which specializes in rapidly developing and testing AI products, has released four free AI services: two new tools, Zoobr and Narra, and updated versions of two existing ones, Multitul and Type. All four tools are available to the general public and can help anyone who works with text or prepares educational and other materials.
When a Book Becomes a Conversation Partner
The new services support a range of learning and productivity tasks. Zoobr works as a personal learning curator, building a course tailored to each user’s age, skill level and goals. The result is a series of short lessons featuring flashcards, diagrams and interactive elements. Each chapter ends with a quiz, and topics that users struggle with reappear in later assignments to help reinforce what they have learned. The app also includes Smart Chat, which can explain difficult concepts or help solve problems from a photo, including images of handwritten text. To help users get started quickly, Zoobr offers 80 ready-made courses, while all learning progress is saved to the user’s profile.
Narra takes a different approach, turning reading into an interactive conversation. Users simply upload a book in EPUB, PDF or FB2 format, and AI creates virtual conversation partners based on the book’s characters. Readers can discuss the plot, characters’ motivations and their actions with them. The catalog already includes about 500 books in Russian and 1,000 in English. The service can also read books aloud in different voices and generate illustrations for individual scenes.
The updated Multitul helps users quickly create presentations, study notes and curated teaching materials from documents, web content or personal notes. It can summarize source material and generate questions to test comprehension. Type, a virtual keyboard, is designed for voice-based input. The latest version recognizes professional terminology more accurately, and users can edit text simply by speaking.
Neuroquizzes and an AI Assistant for Computer Science Teachers
Educational technology is moving from general-purpose chatbots toward tools designed for specific tasks. In 2023, Sber launched GigaChat, initially by invitation and later to the general public. Yandex was integrating YandexGPT into its products around the same time.
The focus gradually shifted toward education. In 2024, Yandex introduced a suite of AI assistants for schools, including a math tool for students in grades 5–8. That same year, Google upgraded NotebookLM with video support and a feature called Audio Overview, which helps users turn documents into audio discussions.
By 2025, AI was increasingly being used to support teachers, not just students. On March 5, Yandex released a set of free tools, including Neuroquizzes for quickly generating tests and an assistant for computer science teachers. On April 30, Google added Russian-language support to Audio Overviews, allowing users to turn text into podcasts. NotebookLM, however, is not available in Russia: the service cannot be accessed from Russian IP addresses. That leaves room for Russian developers to expand their offerings.
In 2026, Sber launched GigaPlatform AI Studio, a free platform where users can build AI agents even without programming skills. Zoobr and Narra followed just two weeks later. Demand for services like these is already established, as research findings clearly show.
From Usage Statistics to Market Strategy
According to a survey by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM), 78% of Russian internet users have used neural networks in some way. More than half of them, 58%, use these services at least once a week. The figures are even more striking among school students: according to surveys by Arkhitekh AI and the School Cluster Association conducted in April 2026, 71% of students in grades 5–11 regularly use AI for their studies.
Sber is therefore entering a market that is already established and continues to grow. According to estimates by BusinesStat, the market was worth 166 billion rubles (about $2.0 billion) in 2025, up 12% from 2024. Between 2021 and 2025, its value increased 2.2-fold.
Personal Identity, Values and Relationships
Today's algorithms are evolving rapidly, and educational systems will soon be able to tailor learning environments even more precisely to students’ needs. Interactive reading is one promising area. Narra, for example, turns a book into a kind of conversation partner. In the future, tools like this could help students learn languages and better understand popular science texts. But to determine how effective they really are, researchers will need to compare the progress of students who learn with AI against the results of those following more traditional approaches.
The government is now exercising tighter oversight of the digital learning environment. In fall 2026, Russia’s Ministry of Education developed rules requiring AI to explain difficult topics rather than complete school assignments on students’ behalf. Teachers remain central to the learning process. Artem Soloveichik, director of Sber’s Center for the Education Industry, shares that view: “When knowledge was scarce, nothing else mattered. Today, the mentor’s personality, values and relationship with the child are especially important. In this way, AI technologies are bringing us back to real human stories.”
