[Music] hey guys today we're going to be reviewing three of the most popular math apps out there mathway photomath and socratic with these three apps you're able to take a photo of whatever math problem you're working on and they can read and hopefully solve your math problem we're going to test them with different problems from algebra 1 all the way up to calculus to see which one is the most useful let's go first up is mathway it's a free app from their parent company chegg you've probably seen their ads on youtube or i used to know them as a place where people upload shady answer keys and tests from previous years they do have a 4.5 rating on the google app store and a 4.9 rating on apple with over 200 000 ratings each so it does sound pretty legit to me looking at the app itself it's free to download and it gives you a quick tour of the app when you open it for the first time you can not only type and take a picture of your problem but you can also speak your math problem which i think is kind of interesting starting with our first problem in algebra 1 we have a linear equation from this algebra 1 textbook where we need to solve for c let's take a picture it gives you some hints as to what you should do to solve for c and it also tells us the correct answer but when i try to tap to view steps it says we need to upgrade to a premium license for 9.99 a month and no student i know is willing to pay for that i'm gonna give this a rating it does give you the answer but it doesn't show you the steps which is the most important part in my book let's try a geometry problem i've chosen a parallel line problem where you're supposed to find the values of angle 1 and 2 using different angle pair relationships it says no math found it looks like it doesn't know how to read diagrams so it's a no for geometry and honestly i don't think this will work for any of these apps for algebra 2 and trig i wanted to test out a factoring problem and then also one about trig identities i chose a problem where you're supposed to factor this expression using the factor by grouping method i think it's kind of cool how it asks you what you want to do with the problem you can choose to factor find the roots factor by grouping that's the one that we want and all of these other possibilities so it makes me confident that it can do these problems but yeah i also expected this where they give you the answer but then not explain how to get there which is unfortunate i also chose a problem on validating trig identities again it asks you what you want to do with the expression i said verify the identity and it's verified and that's it which is so frustrating because it's giving students who can afford the 10 monthly subscription an advantage in class but i guess that's how it is with all things in life unfortunately moving on to pre-calc i wanted to test out matrices this problem is asking me to identify a and b it identified the matrices and then the right answer but still no steps finally let's do calculus and some indefinite integrals for this one we're supposed to integrate by parts to evaluate the integral and it actually did it it tells you that they did integration by parts and shows you the formula which is more than it usually does and then it also shows you the answer not bad but again it fully doesn't show your work so overall mathway did recognize all of the problems that i was scanning which is great but it was super frustrating that you couldn't see any of the steps to the answers unless you paid the free version i don't think is that useful unless you know how to do the problems already and just want to check your answer but if you're truly stuck on a problem and don't know how to do it this free version of the app is probably not for you our second app is photomath this product is specifically geared towards scanning problems and solving them so i have high hopes for this one it has over 2 million reviews on google play it's at a 4.7 rating and over 400 000 on apple and it's at a 4.8 rating it's also a free download but let's see if it makes us buy a premium product like mathway let's get into it when you first open it it asks you to select your language and it gives you a quick tutorial on how to use it and then from then on it'll always show you the camera view when you open it up and you're ready to scan your first photo looking at our first algebra 1 problem oh my gosh it recognized the textbook i was using and also said that you need to pay to see the steps written out i was starting to wonder if all of the apps are like this where you need to pay to view the steps but i found out that if you copy and paste the same question into a word doc or something it doesn't recognize it's from a textbook and it shows you all of the steps for free and this is exactly what i want in a math app it lays out all of the steps super clearly and even has commentary as to what is being done in each step but just don't let it know that your problem is from a textbook for geometry photomath actually recognized the exact problem in my textbook again it tells you the answer but i'm not sure if this is just the same answer that comes with the textbook but it perfectly explains the angle pair relationship you have to use to find both the angles one and two i wanted to see again if it would recognize it or solve it if i were to draw the same problem on a separate sheet of paper but it didn't work so i don't think any geometry problems will work on this app if it's a random question your teacher made up on a separate worksheet for algebra 2 it still freaks me out how it knows exactly what textbook i'm using and again it tells me to upgrade to photomath plus but if i scroll down i can see the same exact problem and this time it does give me the steps for free the steps weren't super clear but it does show a little bit of work i think a student would be able to figure it out for trig it not only verified that this is a trade identity but again it clearly shows each step and explains it if you want to go in more depth you need to buy the plus version but i think this already shows you more than enough and it's a lot more than the free version of mathway for precalc man this app is incredible i have a feeling photomath is going to be the mvp of this video it did identify the matrices and then calculate it and walk through super detailed steps you have to do to get to the final solution calculus this is what i'm talking about it tells you to integrate by parts and it tells you every single step along the way it tells you what you have to plug in for u what you have to plug in for v and it tells you the formula the formatting is a little weird but i can look past that overall i'm a huge fan of photo math it's super easy to use and all or at least most of the explanations were free and in depth unless it was straight from a textbook this one's definitely going to be hard to beat our last app that we're reviewing today is socratic this is an app made by google and from its website it says that it helps with all of these different subjects like math science and even language arts and history but obviously today we're only testing math i'm pretty excited for this one because google has access to some very very powerful artificial intelligence technology it also has fairly good ratings on both the google and apple app stores although not nearly as many reviews as photomath let's see how it goes when you first open the app it asks you to pick a google account to log into which i found was kind of weird i picked one of my accounts and it brought me to their camera page for algebra 1 you can tell that it picked up my problem and it not only solves the problem but it explains to you step by step without you having to pay for any type of service and it takes it a step further because it also has these little info cards with key concepts like solving for a variable even related videos from youtube and other similar questions on the internet so i think i like this app the best so far at least for algebra for geometry it's supposed to find the measure of angle 1 and 2 but it just registered as 150 degrees it's just repeating the 150 degrees that was already on the problem and then now it's talking about maps and longitude and latitude and alaska i don't think socratic got it at all we're in the wrong subject that was a weird one for algebra 2 i'm starting to realize that socratic basically helps you google search your math problem and it lists all of the other websites or apps that has the answer like it links you to scimath mathpapa even mathway and these external sites are the ones that actually have the answer which is pretty much what google does like google is a search engine and it doesn't actually have content so this is interesting but kind of effective socratic is still probably one of the most useful ones for algebra because if you don't understand one explanation you can click on the next explanation from another website that might be more detailed or might make more sense for you for trig it did not quite work for the trig identity i think if the same exact question is not on google then it's hard for socratic to give you the actual answers it first led me to wolfram alpha which is like an online calculator but like mathway you need to pay to show the steps and then there are a lot of other trig identity examples but not the exact one i'm looking for not great but i still think it's better than mathway socratic actually did the worst for pre-calc because it recognized the matrices but gave me absolutely nothing there weren't answers but it does give you little information cards on how to find the inverse of the matrix and then how to multiply them but it doesn't quite do what i want it to which is actually solve the problem so i think it's starting to fall apart at these higher level classes for the calc integral it did something weird where it found the exact problem on a socratic forum which was a socratic user's response that showed the complete solution and was super clear so i guess it did work is this cheating but at least it searched for the answer and the solution and the steps to get there which is what we wanted at the end of the day overall socratic went from my favorite app when we started with algebra but it quickly went to my least favorite when it couldn't even recognize the questions itself for some of the harder subjects like matrices and precalc if i were to rank all of the apps we went over today i would put hands down photo math at the top then mathway because it does recognize the problems and it does have the answers but you need to pay for the steps then at the bottom socratic because sometimes it just had no idea what was going on in general i think all of these apps are incredible and really great tools to help out with homework but obviously don't use it just to copy down answers or cheat on your tests anyways thanks everyone for watching like and subscribe to let me know if this was useful for you and i know there are a lot more math problems and subjects out there that i didn't show so if you want to see anything else in particular or maybe i missed an app that you usually use let me know in the comments below i'll see you in the next one