On Tuesday, Khan Academy announced that they will make their AI assistant Khanmigo available to anyone in the world, for free. This is great news for students everywhere… and it also happens to be great news for writers!
That’s because hidden among Khan Academy’s new features is a browser-based writing app. It works a bit like Google Docs or Medium — only it’s turbocharged with AI! Within this app, Khanmigo can generate content for you, offer suggestions, or revise what you’ve written according to your instructions. It’s the perfect boost to get you over your writer’s block or help you edit when you’re up against a deadline. I’ve already used Khanmigo to help write several articles, and I’ve found it’s everything it claims to be, and more.
Khanmigo is aimed primarily at teachers, but it’s useful for a lot more than education. You can use it to write literally anything. A short story, a blog post, the plot of your next D&D campaign… the sky’s the limit!
How to Sign Up
You can sign up for a free Khan Academy account at this link: Khanmigo.AI
Click “Sign up for free” and create an account. After logging in, you’ll see a menu of tools that looks a bit like this:
The most versatile writing tool is the one called “Informational Text.” After clicking it, you’ll be prompted to choose a topic to write about, and a grade level to set the complexity and detail of the text. Khanmigo will take it from there, writing a whole first draft for you.
Once you have a first draft, you can ask Khanmigo to add more details. Just hit “enter” to create a new paragraph, and an “Ask Khanmigo” popup will appear. Click it and choose “fill this in” from the menu, and Khanmigo will write the paragraph for you.
Other options become available when you highlight text. For example, you can ask Khanmigo to choose a synonym for a specific word or simplify a complex sentence. You can even highlight a whole paragraph and choose “make changes to this” to give Khanmigo specific instructions about how to edit your content. For a laugh, try telling it to “rewrite this in the style of Jerry Seinfeld.” ;)
All these features add up to an impressive first release from Khan Academy, and we can only expect it to get better from here. It’s likely that Khan Academy will add even more useful features to Khanmigo in the coming months, as they now have a partnership with Microsoft (who of course created the ubiquitous Office suite of apps, like Microsoft Word). Remember Clippy, the “helpful” paperclip avatar that would try to help you format your emails in Word 98? Khanmigo is Clippy, but 1000x better. With Microsoft backing the technology behind Khanmigo, we can expect it to improve by leaps and bounds.
Still, what we currently have is only an early release, and Khanmigo is not without flaws. The main criticism I have of the writing experience is that it’s hard to find documents you’ve already written. Also, Khanmigo will sometimes crash and lose your work, which can be frustrating. To save your draft to a more permanent location, Khan Academy provides a button to export to Google Docs. I hope they add integrations with other platforms in the future. For now, I’ve found the most reliable thing is to copy-paste my text somewhere safe when I’m done using Khanmigo.
Even with these flaws, Khanmigo is a gem. A free AI assistant for everyone, that writes and copy edits and can even have a conversation with you? I’ll take it!
Happy writing! If you make something cool with Khanmigo, let me know in the comments.
