Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
Hi HN, we are Sina Atalay and Abdullah Geduk, co-founders of Academa. We are both PhD students. We thought: what if lecture videos were written as code and compiled into video using computer graphics and TTS? Then LLMs could write them, and lectures could be fixed with code edits instead of video production. On correctness: LLMs may make mistakes. But these videos are code sitting in our repository, and we can maintain them. Every report and review becomes a fix in the source, and everyone who watches after that gets the corrected lecture. Every recorded lecture on the internet is stuck with…
Academa generates technical lecture videos using LLMs and computer graphics, creating content on demand in approximately 25 minutes. Users can request videos on any STEM topic, watch hand-maintained lectures, or chat… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
X-Pilot▲328Hi HN, I'm Heshan, founder of X-Pilot. We're building an AI Video Generator for online courses and educational content. Unlike most text-to-video generator that render videos directly from models (which often produce random stock footage unrelated to the actual content), we take a code-first approach: generate editable code layers, let users verify/refine them, then render to video. The Problem We're Solving Most AI video generators treat "education" and "marketing" the same—they optimize for "looks good" rather than "logically accurate." When you feed a technical tutorial or course…
Apr 2026 · x-pilot.ai · its alternatives →
- 2HL
All content is based on Andrej Karpathy's "Intro to Large Language Models" lecture (youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI). I downloaded the transcript and used Claude Code to generate the entire interactive site from it — single HTML file. I find it useful to revisit this content time to time.
Apr 2026 · ynarwal.github.io · its alternatives →
- 3VI
Hi HN, We've just published a lot of original, visual, and intuitive explanations of concepts to introduce people to large language models. It's available for free with no sign-up needed and it includes text articles, some video explanations, and code examples/notebooks as well. And we're available to answer your questions in a dedicated Discord channel. You can find it here: https://llm.university/ Having written https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/, I've been thinking about these topics and how best to communicate them for half a…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 4AT
I've been building prototypes of new AI learning tools for months, but I recently learned that 3blue1brown open sourced his incredible math animation library, Manim, and that LLMs could generate code for it without any fine-tuning. So I made a tool that automatically generates animated math/science explanations in the style of 3blue1brown using Manim from any text prompt. Try it yourself at https://TMA.live (no signup required) or see the demo video here: https://x.com/i/status/1874948287759081608 The UX is pretty simple right now, you just write a…
2025 · tma.live · its alternatives →
- 5IM
Hi HN, University lectures are long, dense, and fast-paced. Like many students, I used to record them thinking I’d revisit them later — but that never really worked. Even transcripts felt like raw logs. So I built [Notorium](https://www.notorium.app) — an AI assistant that records live lectures and automatically turns them into structured notes, flowcharts, and mind maps— within minutes after class. What it does: - Record lectures inside the app (in-person, live) - Transcribe using Whisper - Send the full transcript to LLM - Use a custom system prompt to: - Summarize the lecture -…
2025 · notorium.app · its alternatives →
- 6
Hey HN, I've been working on this side project for the past month. It generates a step-by-step tutorial guide for YouTube videos that you can follow along without watching long videos. Best suited for tutorial videos but can work for other videos aswell. No BS. Just straight to the point. The guides are generated from pure transcript so you don't have to worry about it being AI. It's my first project as a total beginner. Something I had to do inorder to get out of tutorial hell. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or if you face any problems or bugs. I would try to fix them to the…
2024 · stepify.tech · its alternatives →
- 7
An exciting aspect of what I'm working on is that users can create their own playlists. For example, you can provide an outline of what you're learning, such as notes from your professor or any other structure, and the pipeline will create a course tailored to that. Since the content is highly customized, it will be relevant and high-quality, matching current lessons or lectures in school or university. Initially, the pipeline also generated some teaching content using AI, but due to the risk of AI hallucinations, I'm planning to pivot away from that. The new focus will be on curating…
2024 · coursely.ai · its alternatives →
- 8CT
Hi everyone! I originally created CodeVideo as a little side project using FFMPEG WASM in the browser as an experiment, but it's since grown into my vision for a completely automated software educational course production system. The idea is that you create the educational content once, then can export the course to multiple formats - as a video (of course!), but also as an interactive webpage, a blog post, or even a book, PDF, or PowerPoint! Basically a "create once, ship everywhere" concept. Things will get more interesting as I incorporate stuff like spell check (for speech) and abstract…
2025 · studio.codevideo.io · its alternatives →
- 9
Multimodal(PDF + Video) LLM pipeline that transforms educational content—PDFs, videos (with transcripts), handwritten notes - into comprehensive, searchable markdown notes. Turn 10 hours of lectures into 2 hours of focused reading. - Slydite/lore-engine
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Turn Markdown into Video Lectures in Minutes
Jun 2026 · app-c00hnbdp0jk1.appmedo.com · its alternatives →
- 11IB
Hey all! I wanted to share this project I've been working on that can maybe help you or your developer friends out. I built a RAG system for our product a while back and didn't realize how easy they were to get started. So I put together my learnings into this online course. It's not quite ready but if you sign up and mention HackerNews, I can get you early access. I'm looking to get feedback on the following: (1) materials — is it engaging & did you learn something? (2) UI/UX of the platform — did you have any issues that prevented you from starting or finishing the tutorial? (3)…
2024 · takehomes.com · its alternatives →
- 12IB
Hey everyone! I recently built this little side project that takes any document you upload and turns it into practice quizzes using LLMs to generate the questions: https://www.cuiz-ai.com Being a backend engineer, I have always struggled to finish my side projects due to my awful frontend skills. Now, with the progress of AI coding tools, I had no more excuses. 100% of the frontend, landing page and even the logo was made using a combination of Cursor, ChatGPT and Claude, but it's always been under my supervision and never blindly accepted the proposed changes. The backend and…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 13HS
Hi everyone! We (Christopher and Govind) have started a video tutorial series of 20-25 minute long episodes on how to make various common computer science data structures, such as vectors, linked lists, hashmaps, and so on. So far, we’ve done a two-part series on how to implement vectors. Links to parts one and two of the Vectors series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr0KzD_Owxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3kgbdhUIxU (Sorry about the low quality of the video in the first link, we accidentally recorded in 720p. The second part is in 1080p!) Although so far…
2019 · its alternatives →
- 14
Turn any document into an engaging video course in 15 min
2025 · bonzaiai.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Periplus▲20I've been building this for a few months now, started because I was frustrated with how I learn using LLMs. You get a wall of text that vanishes into chat history. Wikipedia's the opposite: endless rabbit holes without structure. I wanted something in between. Periplus generates courses as connected markdown documents, tailored to your level. It asks a few questions upfront, builds a syllabus, and each concept links to related ones. Click a term you don't understand and it opens a new document side-by-side. Heavy inspiration from Obsidian - the graph view is similar, and there's an Obsidian…
2025 · periplus.app · its alternatives →
- 16
I recently submitted another project for using LLMs to correct errors and improve formatting of OCRed documents which was well received. The low cost and high quality/speed of the latest "value tier" models from OpenAI and Anthropic have made it possible to get compelling results at a very reasonable price in that application. It occured to me that the same approach taken there (namely, splitting documents into chunks and sending each chunk through a chain of LLM prompts that each take the output of the previous prompt and apply an additional layer of processing) could be easily applied…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17IB
Hey HN! I built Transcrib.ee to help me generate transcripts for lectures on YouTube with no captions, especially multilingual lectures. I was constantly frustrated with videos that had no transcripts or inaccurate ones, so I built a tool and decided to share it with everyone. This tool uses Groq (an AI inference engine that's different from Grok and offers very fast processing) and OpenAI's Whisper model (really accurate in multilingual) to quickly transcribe any YouTube video, regardless of the language. It's been a game-changer for my studies! To make it even faster, I created a Chrome…
2024 · transcrib.ee · its alternatives →
- 18
Alt▲21Most AI notetakers have a 300 minute limit. This is not enough for uni students like me, or people who do remote work. So, I made a notetaker that runs the ASR model on-device. - Free with local ASR & LLM models - No transcription time limit - High accuracy for non-english speech, support for 100 languages - Real-time transcription - Zoom/Google Meet support - No internet needed - Efficient battery usage (~6 hours on full charge on my M2 Pro) This started as a small cli tool I made for myself, then many of my uni friends really liked it, so here it is as an app! I hope a lot of people…
Dec 2025 · altalt.io · its alternatives →
- 19
Chat with any text model or let us route you to the best one for your question. Generate images with any image model, create videos or build workflows you can run again and again.
2024 · tryblend.ai · its alternatives →
- 20
Hey HN! I built Topic2Manim to automate the creation of educational videos like those from 3Blue1Brown. The workflow is simple: 1. Give it any topic (e.g., "how ChatGPT works") 2. An LLM generates an educational script divided into scenes 3. LLM generates Manim code for each scene 4. FFmpeg concatenates everything into a final video Currently working on TTS integration for narration! Would love feedback on the approach and ideas for the TTS integration
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Torial▲17I'm a huge fan of 3B1B and how he creates appealing and easy-to-understand videos. But he doesn't have a video for every single topic. Whenever I needed help in math or physics, I would try to watch his videos but the issue is that are just not specific enough to my content or curriculum. This issue applies to every single video explanation out there, they just aren't personalized. Most educational videos explain general topics, but they don’t align perfectly with the specific question I have or the way I need it explained. That’s the gap I wanted to fill. So I built a tool that generates…
2025 · trytorial.com · its alternatives →
- 22
CodeVideo▲12Create software educational content in minutes, not hours.
2025 · codevideo.io · its alternatives →
- 23
I trained the 65b model on my texts so I can talk to myself. It's pretty useless as an assistant, and will only do stuff you convince it to, but I guess it's technically uncensored? I'll leave it up for a bit if you want to chat with it. I posted this to Reddit and had several hundred people talking to it. Salient points from that discussion: LLAMA 1 65b Rank 128 5 epochs Batch size 1, 256 cutoff Trained in the Oobabooga suite using bitsandbytes 4-bit quantization for the lora Loss around 1.5 seems to give the most coherent results Trained on raw text dumps that is then parsed by a crappy…
2023 · airic.serveo.net · its alternatives →
- 24
Turn any lecture into a learning plan
Feb 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- X-Pilot alternatives
- How LLMs Work – Interactive visual guide based on Karpathy's lecture alternatives
- Visual intuitive explanations of LLM concepts (LLM University) alternatives
- AI that generates 3blue1brown-style explainer videos alternatives
- I made an AI that turn live lecture into structured notes,mind-maps,PDF alternatives
- I made a website that converts YT videos into step-by-step guides alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →