Talk with the minds who made history
Awaken History is an AI history education platform for teachers and students. A student reads a short primer, then talks with the historical figure who lived it, by voice or by typing, and has to explain and defend what they think. Replies draw on the figure's own words, and the teacher sees every transcript.
Any subject with people in it
Awaken History is a format, not a syllabus. An educator writes the readings, casts the figures, and sets the arc a conversation has to travel. The platform supplies the voice, the pushback, and the record of what was actually said.
- History
- Art history
- Philosophy
- Literature
- Science
- Civics
How a lesson goes
01
Read
A ten-minute primer written from inside the figure’s own frame of reference — what they knew, what they had not seen yet. Technical terms are defined on hover, so nobody stalls on vocabulary.
02
Converse
Then you meet them, by voice or by typing. The conversation follows an arc: they push back, ask what you mean, and will not let a vague answer stand. You have to hold up your end.
03
Bring it to class
Every conversation ends with a prep card — the line you want to open discussion with, and a short reflection. Your teacher reads real thinking instead of collecting another worksheet.
Awaken History does not give you a score or points. Debate lessons end with automated feedback on your argument, which you and your instructor can see. Your instructor decides whether and how your work here counts in your course.
For educators
Built for the person running the room
Awaken History is not a chatbot you point students at and hope. You set the arc, you see the transcripts, and you walk in knowing what the class actually thinks.
- Cohorts and join codes
- Spin up a class, hand out a code, and see who has actually done the reading — not just who clicked through it.
- A brief before the bell
- Each session generates a pre-class brief: where students got stuck, which questions split the room, and the three openers worth using.
- Author your own course
- Teaching a subject we do not ship? Build your own figures, readings, and conversation arcs in the studio. No prompt engineering required.
Your instructor can review your conversations, prep cards, and reflections, sees the automated feedback on debate lessons, and sees class-level themes across the cohort. Students are told this at sign-up and again before every conversation.
Questions teachers ask
What is Awaken History?
Awaken History is a coursework tool where students talk with historical figures. Each lesson pairs a short reading with a conversation, by voice or by typing, with the person the reading is about. The figure asks questions and pushes back on vague answers, and the lesson isn't finished until the student has covered the ideas and taught them back.
Who is it for?
Teachers and their students. A teacher sets up a class and hands out a join code, and students sign up with that code, there is no way to join as a student without one. Students have to be at least 13 unless their school arranges access. We built it for history class first, but it works for any subject with people in it, like philosophy, art history or civics.
How is it different from a chatbot, or from Humy and Hello History?
A chatbot answers whatever you ask it. In Awaken History the figure runs the conversation along an arc: recall, an interview, a challenge, and then the student teaches it back. Humy, which grew out of Hello History, has a much bigger library of over 1,200 figures and graded assignment formats. Awaken History is narrower, each course has a small cast tied to its readings, and the teacher gets a brief built from what the class actually said.
Are the figures' answers grounded in real sources?
Yes, with a limit. Each reply draws on the figure's own writing and the course's readings, and a Sources used note under the reply names what it drew on and shows any line quoted word for word. The figures are still AI portrayals and not the real people, and they can get things wrong. We think of a conversation as a way into the sources, not a replacement for them.
What does a teacher get?
A class with its own join code, every student's transcript, prep card and reflection, and a discussion brief for each lesson. The brief groups what students said into themes with anonymized quotes and gives three openers for class discussion. Teachers can also write their own course in the app, including the readings, the figures, the glossary and the conversation arc.
How much does it cost, and how do I get access?
There is no public pricing yet. We set up teacher accounts ourselves, so email jonah@voicesofhistory.co and we'll stage a demo course you can walk through as the teacher and as a student. Students don't buy anything, they sign up with their class code.
Which figures and subjects are on it?
The first full course is A History of Artificial Intelligence: eleven conversations with Alan Turing, John McCarthy, Frank Rosenblatt, Bill Gates, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Marc Andreessen. There are demo courses for Contemporary Civilization, built on Book I of Plato's Republic, and for Music Humanities. Living figures get painted portraits, never photographs.