Google said it is launching a new tool called Guided Learning within Gemini to act as a personal learning companion.

"Guided Learning is informed by years of research and partnership with educators, pedagogical experts and students," it noted.

The new tool encourages students to move beyond answers and develop their own critical thinking skills.

This comes after OpenAI last month launched study mode in ChatGPT which it said was built with college students in mind.

The launch of Guided Learning and study mode comes amid research studies that the use of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini is bluting critical thinking skills of students.

Google said that the idea of Guided Learning went back to 2022 when it established a cross-disciplinary team of AI experts, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. 

"Working closely with external learning experts, we found that simply improving prompting wasn’t enough to create a meaningful learning tool," it said.

This insight led to the creation of LearnLM, so it could infuse learning science into its foundational models, it added.

Earlier this year, these capabilities were brought into Gemini 2.5.