AI Agents

Most of what Scholarly creates isn't a single reply from a chatbot. When you ask for a video lecture, a study guide, or a set of flashcards, you give the tool a goal and your material, and it comes back with the finished thing — not a draft you have to assemble yourself.

This page explains what that means in practice.

Agent vs. chatbot

A chatbot answers one message at a time and waits for your next prompt. An agent is different:

• You give it a goal ("turn these three PDFs into a 10-minute lecture"), not just a question.
• It works through the whole job rather than one reply.
• It checks its own work against your sources before finishing.

You don't prompt each step. You pick a tool, add your sources, set any options you care about, and let it run.

What you get

• Grounded in your sources. It starts from the PDFs, notes, slides, reports, and recordings you added, so the result reflects your actual material rather than the open internet.
• Web research when your sources leave a gap. It looks things up where needed and cites what it used alongside your own material.
• A finished artifact, not a transcript. Slides, audio, video, spreadsheets, and documents come back as real files saved to your library.
• Citations you can check. The result is reviewed against your material and cited before it is saved.

Because the work runs on its own, you can close the tab and come back to it. See Background Tasks, or Scheduled Tasks to start one at a chosen time instead.

Which tools work this way

Most AI create options do, including AI Video Lectures, AI Slides, AI Podcasts, Deep Research, Quizzes and Exams, Study Guides, Worksheets, AI Spreadsheets, Infographics, Mind Maps, Story Books, Text-to-Speech, Transcribe, and AI Flashcards. Each tool shows a one-line description of what it makes, so you can pick the right one at a glance.

A few surfaces work turn by turn with you instead: AI Chat, the AI Essay Writer, and the Image Playground respond to each message rather than running a whole job on their own.

We build them for you

Scholarly is not a build-your-own-bot platform. The tools are designed and maintained for you, so you get a usable result on the first try without prompt engineering or setup. You bring the material, pick a tool, and it does the work.

To see the bigger picture, visit the AI Agents overview.