Unstructured Powers Multimodal RAG for Alayna's Innovative AI Solutions for Educators

Teachers don’t have enough time to prepare well for class so finding innovative solutions to streamline their tasks is vital to maintaining education quality in schools. Alayna’s mission is to leverage AI to allow teachers to focus more on teaching and less on administrative tasks. To achieve this, Alayna partnered with Unstructured to enhance their product offerings and bring multimodal RAG features to their platform. In this case study, we explore how Alayna launched their latest feature, an AI Slides and Lesson generator, using Unstructured's Serverless API as the key ingestion and preprocessing solution.

^Example slide deck from Alayna’s recent TikTok demo

Alayna leverages AI to improve educational content creation and delivery. Their flagship product, the AI Slides and Lesson Generator, enables educators to create high-quality, engaging lessons tailored to individual learning styles and objectives. This product allows seamless conversion of PDFs into engaging slideshow presentations, with image and text extraction via Unstructured. They also offer an AI Copilot for educators to assist with everyday teaching tasks. 

Multimodal RAG powered by Unstructured

One of the standout features of the Unstructured Serverless API is its ability to handle multimodal data, including text, images, and tables. This was a game-changer for Alayna. As Prabir Vora, Alayna’s co-founder, highlighted,

“When I first learned about Unstructured, I was blown away by the ability to extract not just text, but also images and tables. This is crucial for educational content, where visual aids play a significant role in learning.”

Alayna used the Unstructured Serverless API to partition PDFs and other document formats into their constituent elements. This allowed them to extract meaningful data from textbooks, including diagrams and tables, which were then processed by Alayna's own Large Language Model (LLM) chains built using LangChain. The extracted data was summarized and stored in a vector database, making it accessible for generating new presentations.

Enhanced Lesson Creation

Unstructured provides the unique ability to create engaging lessons from rich media types.For example, teachers now can upload PDFs of textbooks, and the platform will automatically generate a slideshow complete with relevant images and tables. This feature, which Alayna launched on July 8, received overwhelming feedback from educators. As Prabir noted,

“The fact that they can now upload their PDFs and have them converted into a slideshow is a game-changer.”

A recent demo of the Textbook to Slides feature illustrates how a PDF unit on photosynthesis is transformed into a detailed and visually appealing lesson presentation:

This not only saves educators time, but also ensures that the lessons are more engaging for students and appeals to all types of learners. Research has shown that including video, text, audio, and interactive content in course materials increases information retention rates by up to 60%.

Scalability and Serverless Architecture

Alayna chose Unstructured’s Serverless API over open-source solutions for its scalability and efficiency. The serverless architecture allowed them to process multiple pages of documents simultaneously, significantly speeding up the workflow,

“We could focus on scaling what we are really building rather than having to focus on this part of our functionality,” Prabir explained.

This flexibility was crucial as Alayna grew and the number of requests per second increased.

Conclusion

Together with Unstructured, Alayna delivers a critical tool for educators: directly embedding images and tables from source materials into presentations. This recent TikTok showcasing the platform's features has garnered significant attention, highlighting the growing interest in AI-driven educational solutions.

Unstructured is proud to support Alayna in their mission to revolutionize education, providing ETL that makes such innovative solutions possible. We look forward to seeing how they continue to transform the educational landscape. If you want to try out the Unstructured Serverless API for yourself, sign up for a 2-week free trial here.