Education in Thailand faces a familiar challenge: teachers overwhelmed by grading, and students left waiting for feedback that often comes too late. Enter RISA, an AI-powered assistant developed by SCB 10X in partnership with the Office of the Education Council and powered by** Typhoon**. Designed to help students prepare for the PISA Reading Comprehension exam, RISA is more than a chatbot, it’s a bold initiative toward reshaping the future of learning nationwide.
The Challenges
Through research and discussions with educators, SCB 10X identified recurring pain points in Thai classrooms:
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Teacher workload: Teachers spend 6–8 hours per week grading open-ended responses and preparing feedback — leaving less than half their time for direct instruction.
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Student needs: Learners require different levels of support, from quick clarifications to step-by-step guidance. Without timely feedback, achievement gaps widen and frustration grows.
The Solution: RISA, Powered by Typhoon
To address these challenges, SCB 10X partnered with the Ministry of Education’s Office of the Education Council to launch RISA (Reimagined Interactive Study Assistant). The pilot program focused on PISA Reading Comprehension exam preparation, reaching approximately 10,000 students across 350+ schools.
RISA was designed as a dual-role AI assistant:
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Grading Assistant: Evaluates open-ended answers using official scoring criteria and generates rationales tailored to each student.
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Explaining Assistant: Clarifies concepts in Thai, adapting explanations for different learning levels (novice, intermediate, advanced) and adjusting tone and style (concise vs. step-by-step).
Accessible via LINE, the most widely used chat application in Thailand, RISA delivers round-the-clock support in a format familiar to both students and teachers.
At its core, RISA is built on the Typhoon family of models ensuring RISA’s responses are not only accurate but also culturally and linguistically aligned with Thai learners.
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Typhoon OCR: Digitizes exam materials from PDF into structured datasets, enabling AI-driven grading and feedback.
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Text Models (70B, 12B): Optimized for Thai, with contextual understanding of complex Thai words often used in reading context. A 128k-token context window enables grading of long passages. Typhoon also includes a safety classifier to filter harmful or biased outputs.
What makes Typhoon different is that it was trained with Thai at the center, not as an afterthought. This allows RISA to explain in the way Thai teachers would, using familiar idioms, natural tone, and step-by-step reasoning that resonates with students. For an education project, that cultural and linguistic fidelity is critical.”
— Panuwat Poon, Business Lead – RISA AI Product Manager, SCB 10X
Results & Impact
Initial pilots with ~100 students showed strong promise. When scaled to 10,000 students across 350 schools, the results were even more compelling:
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Improved learning outcomes: 55–56% of students improved their scores (pre-test vs. post-test of equal difficulty).
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Reduced teacher workload: ~5 hours saved per week through automated grading and feedback.
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Accuracy: 90% grading accuracy compared with human teachers.
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Teacher evaluation: 98% rated AI explanations highly for clarity, completeness, and naturalness.
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Student engagement: Average of 20.5 minutes per session, significantly above the EdTech benchmark of 14–16 minutes.
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Safety: Less than 1% hallucination or safety issues reported.
RISA is proving that AI can reduce administrative burdens for teachers while improving learning outcomes for students.
Guardrails AI Spotlight: Scaling Safety at Speed
A defining feature of RISA is its commitment to trust and safety. Partnering with Guardrails AI, the team integrated the Snowglobe simulation platform to rigorously test chatbot interactions.
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400+ test cases generated in a single day (vs. a week with manual testing).
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Simulations spanned 50+ student personas and sensitive scenarios, from off-topic misuse to political or cultural discussions.
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**Impact: **Reduced error rates from **89% to 0%, **enabling a safe rollout to 10,000 students across 350 schools, with zero safety incidents.
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**Scalability: **The same framework now supports expansion to potentially 100,000+ students in future phases.
Using Snowglobe, we can run over 400 test cases in just a day, compared to requiring 2–3 people working for at least a week to manually generate and test all scenarios. This has transformed how we test our AI applications to make sure they are safe and guarded against unintended use, helping us achieve near-zero failure rates while ensuring our educational chatbot safely serves thousands of students across Thailand.”
— Panuwat Poon, Business Lead – RISA AI Product Manager, SCB 10X
Conclusion
The pilot revealed three important lessons:
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AI should augment, not replace teachers. Automating grading frees educators to focus on high-value teaching and mentorship.
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Language and cultural alignment matter. Typhoon’s Thai-native models ensure explanations resonate with students and feel natural.
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Safety is non-negotiable. Guardrails AI and Typhoon’s built-in classifiers establish trust with teachers, parents, and policymakers.
This initiative reflects the power of cross-sector collaboration:
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Office of the Education Council (สกศ.) provided subject matter experts on PISA exam framework, and the network of educators and participating schools.
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SCB 10X developed RISA with Typhoon models.
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Guardrails AI ensured safety with Snowglobe simulations.
RISA is still in its early stages, but its trajectory is promising. Beyond PISA preparation, the assistant could expand into other subjects and assessments, offering personalized learning at scale. With proven effectiveness, safety, and scalability, RISA has the potential to support Thai education making learning more inclusive and effective nationwide.
