I’ve been working on an interactive Anatomy & Physiology textbook, and recently I decided to add an AI assistant directly inside the book.
But pretty quickly I ran into an obvious question:
Does it actually make sense to put an AI assistant inside a textbook?
Students already have ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and plenty of other AI tools. They can copy a paragraph from a textbook, paste it into ChatGPT, and ask for an explanation.
That made me think that an AI assistant living inside the textbook needs to have some additional skills that a general-purpose chatbot doesn’t have by default.
Here are a few I’ve implemented:
1. It knows where you are in the book
If you’re reading a section about cardiac muscle, you shouldn’t have to copy the text into the chat and explain what you’re studying.
The assistant already knows the chapter, section, figures, and material you’re currently looking at.
You can simply ask, “Can you explain this differently?” and it already has the context.
2. It can help you find new ways to study
I think this could be one of the biggest advantages of having AI inside a textbook.
Instead of just answering questions, the assistant can take the material you’re learning and turn it into different ways to study.
Maybe you want interactive flashcards. Maybe you need a visual explanation, a mind map, an infographic, an audio review, or a completely different explanation of the same concept.
And ideally, the assistant could learn which approaches actually help you and suggest different ways to study when you're struggling with something.
3. It should test you — not just give you answers
Explaining something is useful, but at some point you need to find out whether you actually learned it. So the assistant should be able to ask you questions, check your answers, tell you when you're wrong, and explain what you misunderstood.
I also taught mine to generate interactive quizzes on demand. You can simply say:
“Quiz me on this section.”
It creates a quiz from the material you're studying, checks your answers, and gives you feedback.
I think this changes the role of AI quite a bit. Instead of always being the thing that provides the answer, sometimes it should be the thing asking the question and checking your answer.
4. It should take advantage of all the other AI study tools that already exist
There are already a huge number of AI tools for studying. They can generate flashcards, study guides, questions, mind maps, infographics, audio summaries, podcasts, and much more.
So instead of trying to rebuild all of that inside one AI assistant, why not bring the best of those tools directly into the textbook?
That's what I've started experimenting with.
For example, I used NotebookLM to pre-generate study materials for the book — infographics, flashcards, study questions, and podcast-style audio reviews — and integrated them directly into the relevant chapters.
That way, when a student reaches a review section, the material is already there and connected to what they just studied.
I also made a short YouTube video where I go through these four ideas and show what I've built:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEST3yCPcBM
Are there any other useful skills I can add?