An AI study buddy is a tool that studies alongside you rather than answering for you. GeniusPal reads the notes or PDF you upload and turns them into a set you take as a scored quiz, with flashcards and written active recall over the same questions on a paid plan, then tracks what you got wrong and brings it back. The difference between that and a chat assistant is who does the thinking: a chat assistant hands you an explanation, while a study buddy makes you produce the answer yourself, which is the part that actually builds memory. It also gives the work a face. Your pal levels up as you finish rounds, which turns a revision session into something with visible progress attached. The boundary is that it will not do your assignment for you, and everything it asks you comes from material you supplied.
Yes, and the buddy part of it is free permanently. Your pal, its XP, its levels, its prestige badges, and every outfit, hat, and prop in the Locker cost nothing on any plan, so a free account and a paid one see an identical character doing identical things. Nothing about your companion is a currency or an upsell. What is metered is the study material it quizzes you on. The Free plan writes 2 sets with no credit card, given once for the account rather than refilled monthly. Student then costs $14.99 a month for 100 sets, and Genius $59.99 annually under a fair-use ceiling of 1000 a month. Both stretch a set from 10 questions to 30 and add the flashcard and written recall modes alongside the quiz. Sets you generated while on Free stay in your account for good, and your pal keeps every level it earned from them.
Whatever your course handed you, in most of the shapes it comes in: PDF, .pptx, .docx, plain text, Markdown, and CSV, at up to 10 MB apiece. There is also no obligation to have a file at all. Pasting a link to a page, or pasting your typed notes straight into the box, both work and are usually faster for something you wrote yourself. The reason the list is that wide is that a study buddy is only as good as the material it has been given, and a tool that accepts one format quietly pushes you toward studying whatever happens to be convenient instead of whatever your exam is set from. One thing it genuinely cannot do is see. Photographs of handwriting, scans with no text layer, and diagrams carry nothing readable, so it says so rather than guessing at the contents.
Finishing a study round earns your pal 4 XP, and enough XP moves it up a level. The set has to have at least 3 questions and you have to grade every one of them, which stops a two-question set being farmed for easy XP. Levels run from 0 to 100 and are grouped into prestige bands, each with its own badge, so there is always a visible next rung rather than an endless bar. The rule exists so that levelling tracks study you actually did. A round you abandon halfway earns nothing, and redrilling only the handful of questions you got wrong is below the 3-question bar, so it improves your recall without moving the bar. Levelling is also entirely free: XP, levels, and badges work the same on every plan, and no amount of money moves your pal up faster.
Yes. The Locker holds outfits, hats, glasses, and things for your pal to carry, and whatever you equip is what you see while you study. Every item is purely cosmetic: none of them affect your generation limit, the questions you get, or how quickly you level up. Your pal is rendered live in 3D rather than as a fixed picture, so it wears your choices in every pose it makes, from waving on the landing page to sitting with you through a round. Nothing in the Locker is behind a paywall or a currency, so a free account and a Genius account open exactly the same wardrobe. The single boundary is that there is one pal rather than a roster of characters to choose between, so what you are changing is how your pal is dressed.