A 28-YEAR-OLD Bulawayo-based youth has defied the odds by developing an application that uses artificial intelligence to help students study online.
The application, StudyMate, makes it easy for students to do their school work without the supervision of their parents. Mr Gladson Dube of Suburbs, a school drop-out, is a self-taught software engineer, who took online tutorials on how to create the application.
He was inspired by ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November last year.
StudyMate is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
ChatGPT was launched as a prototype on November 30, 2022, and quickly garnered attention for its detailed responses and articulate answers across many domains of knowledge.
Artificial intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
Mr Dube said since OpenAI is already big, it allows people who are new in the industry to use their Application Programming Interface (API) by creating a programme that can work in their favour.
API is a software interface that allows two applications to interact with each other without any user intervention. It is a collection of software functions and procedures.
In simple terms, API means a software code that can be accessed or executed.
“By accessing the API it becomes easy to make the programme similar to the one that I have created which is called StudyMate. I chose this particular one because it is safe, fast, and puts a parent at ease when a child is using it,” said Mr Dube.
“It more or else works like Google because you ask questions and it gives you answers.
However, the advantage is that you can keep track of what your child is doing. In fact, you get to know once they start doing their school work as the app will not divert into other things that are not school related.”
Mr Dube, who grew up in Mberengwa, Midlands Province, said he never dreamt of becoming a software engineer given his background.
“Growing up in a rural set-up in Mberengwa, it never crossed my mind that one day I would get hold of technological devices. When l was doing Form Four at Herentals College and that was in 2012, our examination centre was Northlea High School since we did not have enough space at our school,” he said.
“I remember going for my second examination and the invigilators refusing to let me in because l was not carrying my national identity card. When they chased me away, l lost the zeal to continue with exams and dropped out of school.”
Thereafter, Mr Dube started watching tutorials on YouTube and slowly learnt how to do marketing, and graphic designing before he decided to try software engineering.
He said the idea of creating the StudyMate came to him last December.
“With the rise to fame of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, I developed a passion for artificial intelligence and since then I have been obsessed with it up until today,” said Mr Dube.
The self-taught software engineer demonstrated to the Chronicle news crew how his application works by asking it a question and the app provided a detailed answer.
Mr Dube said when he finished designing the application, he gave it to some of his friends to do a test drive for him so that they could offer advice on how best it can be improved.
“Most people who are using my application are actually happy with it. What is left now is for me to pay a fee to the company for which I using its API,” he said.
“After paying the required fee, l am going to be able to fully register, so that I get a domain name that will enable it to be accessible to people.”
For Mr Dube, this is only the beginning of what is likely to be an exciting journey.
“This is just the beginning as I am looking forward to growing my application so that it can have access to the database of Zimsec and help students in Zimbabwe to have access to the syllabi and get specific answers,” he said. – The Chronicle
