Gauth

What is Gauth?

Gauth is an AI-powered homework and study assistant built around a deceptively simple interaction: point your phone at a question, and get back a worked solution with the reasoning laid out step by step. It sits in the category that educators call "photo solvers" or "homework helpers," but the product has grown well past that origin. Gauth is owned by ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, and it launched in 2020 under the Gauthmath name as a photo-based math solver. Gauth was originally launched as Gauthmath, and the company's own privacy and terms pages still carry the line "Gauth (Formerly Gauthmath)" to bridge the two names. The domain has stayed the same throughout, which is why you will still see gauthmath.com in the address bar while the product itself calls the brand Gauth.

What makes Gauth worth understanding rather than dismissing is the breadth it has accumulated. The homepage lists Math, Statistics, Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Economics, Literature, Business, Writing and Social Science as covered areas, so the product is no longer a maths-only calculator. Around the core solver sit an AI live tutor that speaks and draws, a converter that turns your own notes into practice material, a visual exploration mode called Atlas, and a paid tier that routes hard questions to human beings. Gauth describes a tutor service in which thousands of real tutors are available around the clock and solutions arrive in minutes rather than seconds — a meaningfully different promise from instant AI output.

The honest framing is this: Gauth is a fast, broad, heavily distributed study tool with a genuinely useful step-by-step explanation layer and a real human fallback, wrapped in a consumer subscription business whose billing practices and answer accuracy draw substantial criticism from adult reviewers. Both halves of that sentence are supported by evidence, and this page covers both.

Core Features

• Photo-based question capture: The defining interaction is snapping a picture of a printed worksheet, a textbook page, a handwritten problem or an on-screen question. The app recognises the question and crops it automatically, which removes the friction of typing mathematical notation that is awkward or impossible to enter on a phone keyboard. This is the reason the product spread through schools by word of mouth rather than marketing.
• Step-by-step solving with explanations: Gauth does not just return an answer. It presents the sequence of steps that produce it, with commentary connecting the logic of each step through "how" and "why" tips. For a student who is stuck at a specific point in a derivation rather than lost entirely, being able to see where their own work diverged is more valuable than the final number.
• AI Live Tutor with voice and whiteboard: An AI Live Tutor answers by voice and works through the problem on a live whiteboard, which is closer to a screen-share session than a chat window. This matters for concepts that are inherently spatial or procedural — geometry constructions, reaction mechanisms, graph transformations — where a paragraph of prose explains far worse than a drawing that develops as someone talks through it.
• Human expert network on the paid tier: Beyond the AI, Gauth routes questions to a network of human subject experts. A ByteDance spokesperson said the tutors are based in the United States, India, the Philippines and parts of Africa. Turnaround is measured in minutes rather than seconds, which is the trade you make for a person actually reading your specific question.
• Smart Study Converter: Notes, audio recordings and lecture links can be transformed into quizzes and flashcards. This shifts the tool from reactive question-answering toward active recall practice, which is the study technique with the strongest evidence base behind it.
• DeepThinking mode: A slower, more deliberate reasoning mode intended for problems where the fast path produces shallow or wrong output. It is aimed at understanding the "why" behind a result rather than just producing one.
• Gauth Atlas: Gauth Atlas turns a subject into a zoomable visual map, and the company states that every image traces back to a real source. It is an exploratory rather than transactional feature — closer to browsing an illustrated encyclopedia than to solving a specific assigned problem.
• Study toolbox: Reading, Writing and Focus utilities round out the app, including grammar checking, text simplification and a study timer. These are conventional features, but bundling them reduces the number of separate apps a student juggles.

Use Cases

1. Getting unstuck on a single problem at night: The archetypal scenario. A student hits one problem in a set at an hour when no teacher, parent or classmate is reachable. Rather than skipping it and losing the thread of the whole assignment, they photograph it and read the worked steps. The value is continuity — one blocked problem stops derailing an entire evening's work.
2. Checking your own work before submission: A more defensible use than outsourcing. The student solves the problem themselves first, then compares against Gauth's steps to locate where a discrepancy arose. Because the tool shows intermediate steps rather than only the final answer, this comparison is actually possible; an answer-only tool would tell you that you were wrong without telling you where.
3. Bridging a gap in a specific prerequisite: Students frequently fail current material because of an unmastered earlier topic — struggling with calculus because logarithm rules never solidified. The breadth of maths topics covered, from set theory and logarithms through derivatives, integrals and matrix algebra, means the same tool can serve the remedial detour and the current coursework.
4. Turning lecture material into revision practice: Feeding notes or a recorded lecture into the study converter produces quizzes and flashcards. This suits the weeks before an exam, when the bottleneck is not understanding new material but retrieving what was already covered.
5. Working across subjects in one place: A student with maths, chemistry and a literature essay due in the same week can stay in a single interface. The subject list spans quantitative and humanities work, so the writing assistant and text simplifier serve the essay while the solver serves the problem sets.
6. Non-native speakers decoding question wording: Students studying in a second language often understand the underlying concept but stumble on the phrasing of a word problem. The combination of interface localisation and text simplification helps separate a language obstacle from a subject-matter one.

How to use Gauth

1. Install the mobile app from the App Store or Google Play, or open the web calculator at the official site if you would rather work on a laptop. The app is free to download and account creation is required before the solving features become available.
2. Capture the question. Photograph the problem, upload an image file, or type or paste it directly. The web calculator accepts dragged images as well as keyboard entry with dedicated modes for functions, calculus and matrices.
3. Confirm the automatic crop and select the subject if the app asks. Getting the subject right matters more than it sounds — the same notation can mean different things in a statistics context versus a pure maths one.
4. Read the steps rather than the answer. Work down the derivation and identify the first line that differs from your own attempt. That divergence point is the actual lesson; the final result is not.
5. Escalate when the AI output looks wrong or incoherent. Use the live tutor for a spoken walkthrough, or send the question to a human expert if you are on the paid tier. Treat contradictory or self-inconsistent output as a signal to escalate, not as something to submit.
6. Convert what you learned into practice. Feed the topic or your notes into the study converter to generate quizzes, so the problem you just got help with becomes something you can reproduce unaided later.

Tips & Best Practices

• Photograph the whole question, including any preamble: Word problems frequently carry constraints in a sentence above the numbered part. A tight crop around the equation alone strips the context the model needs, and the resulting answer solves a different problem from the one assigned.
• Attempt the problem first, then compare: The step-by-step format is wasted if you read it before trying. Working the problem first and using the tool to locate your divergence converts it from an answer service into a diagnostic tool, and it is the difference between the tool helping your exam performance and quietly hollowing it out.
• Cross-check anything that will be graded: Independent reviewers report incorrect solutions with some regularity, and at least one user described failing an exam after over-relying on it. For work that carries marks, verify against your textbook, a second tool or your own re-derivation.
• Distrust confident but self-contradictory output: The failure mode reviewers describe most is not an obvious error but a fluent answer whose steps do not actually cohere. If step three does not follow from step two, the final answer is unreliable regardless of how assured the presentation looks.
• Use the human tutors for conceptual confusion, the AI for mechanical work: Routine algebraic manipulation is where AI solvers are strongest. Questions phrased as "I do not understand why this approach works" are better served by a person, and the paid tier exists precisely for that.
• Manage the subscription deliberately: Because billing complaints are the dominant theme in adult reviews, note the renewal date when you subscribe, and cancel through the platform where you purchased — the App Store or Google Play subscription settings — rather than assuming an in-app action ends billing.
• Check your institution's policy before you rely on it: Rules on AI assistance vary enormously between schools, and between courses within one school. Knowing where the line sits in your specific course is your responsibility, and it is far cheaper to check in advance than to contest an academic misconduct finding later.

Who is Gauth for?

• Secondary school students in STEM subjects: The core audience, and where coverage is deepest. Algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, physics and chemistry are the areas the product was built around and where its explanations are most reliable.
• University students in introductory courses: First-year mathematics, statistics and science sequences map well onto the covered topic list, including matrix algebra, probability distributions and integral calculus.
• Students returning to study after a gap: Adult learners re-entering education often need to rebuild prerequisites quietly and at their own pace, without asking a classroom full of younger students to wait.
• Learners studying in a second language: Interface localisation across many languages plus text simplification tools help when the barrier is the phrasing of a question rather than its content.
• Parents helping with homework: Adults who once knew the material but have not used it in twenty years can follow a worked derivation to re-orient themselves before explaining it to a child.
• Students preparing for standardised tests: The practice question bank and tutorial video library on the paid tier are oriented toward drilling, which is the dominant activity in test preparation.
• Anyone needing a quick calculator with reasoning: The web calculator serves occasional users who want a computation checked with the steps visible, without installing anything.

Platforms

• iOS: Published as "Gauth: AI Study Companion" and requiring iOS 15.0 or later. The iOS listing ships interface localisation in thirteen languages, including French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. It is free to download with in-app purchases, and carries a 4+ content rating.
• Android: On Google Play the app is published by GauthTech Pte. Ltd. and reports more than 100 million downloads with a rating near 4.8 across roughly 1.94 million reviews. The listing carries an Everyone content rating and in-app purchases.
• Web: The official site provides a browser-based AI calculator with step-by-step output, supporting basic, function, calculus and matrix input modes as well as image upload. The site also exposes task-oriented sections for homework, courses, an assignment solver, Atlas, resources and a blog.
• No public API: There is no developer API or integration surface documented on the official site. Gauth is a consumer end-user product, not a platform component. (To be verified)

Pricing & Plans

Gauth is free to download on both mobile platforms and offers free usage of the core solving features, with the web calculator accessible without installing anything. The free tier is bounded rather than unlimited, and independent reviewers consistently describe hitting a ceiling that pushes toward the paid plan; the free experience also carries advertising, which is a recurring complaint in store reviews. Because there is no standalone pricing page on the official website, the free allowance should be checked in the app itself rather than assumed from third-party summaries, which disagree with each other on the specific limits.

The paid tier is branded Gauth Plus. Gauth Plus is sold as an auto-renewing subscription with monthly, quarterly and annual billing cycles rather than a one-off purchase, and is transacted as an in-app purchase through the App Store or Google Play. It unlocks unlimited explanations, higher answer accuracy, more capable live tutor sessions, a large library of tutorial videos and practice questions, and priority access to the human expert queue. Prices are displayed in-app and vary by region and by promotional offer, so the figures shown in a store listing at any moment are the authoritative ones. One practical note that the marketing does not mention: subscription cancellation friction is the single most common complaint in independent adult reviews, so manage renewals through your platform's subscription settings. Specific entitlements and current pricing are subject to the official pages and the actual in-app purchase flow.

Alternatives

• Photomath: Now owned by Google, and the closest direct analogue for the photo-to-steps interaction. It is narrower — focused firmly on mathematics — but that focus tends to make its step explanations more consistent within its domain.
• Chegg: Oriented toward university coursework, with a large library of textbook solutions and human expert answers. Positioned around depth of academic content rather than instant mobile capture, and priced accordingly.
• Brainly: A community-driven model where students and moderators answer each other's questions. The trade-off is variable answer quality against genuine peer explanation and a much broader long tail of unusual questions.
• Khan Academy: Structurally different — a free curriculum of instructional videos and exercises rather than a solver. Better when the real problem is that a whole topic was never learned, rather than that one specific problem is blocking you.
• General-purpose AI assistants: Mainstream chat assistants handle homework questions competently and accept image input. They lack the education-specific scaffolding, subject routing and human tutor fallback, but they are not bounded by a per-question quota in the same way.

Limitations & Considerations

• Answer accuracy is inconsistent and this is the central risk: Its Trustpilot profile tells a far less flattering story, sitting near 2.3 out of 5 with roughly two thirds of ratings at one star. The complaints cluster on wrong answers delivered confidently, including from users who submitted them for marks. The gap between a 4.8 app store rating and a 2.3 Trustpilot score is not noise; the two populations are rating different things, students rating the experience and adults rating the outcomes and the billing.
• Academic integrity sits genuinely unresolved: A tool that produces a complete worked solution from a photograph can be a learning aid or a substitute for learning, and the difference lies entirely in how the student uses it. Educators have raised a specific and legitimate concern: students who submit AI-produced work all term may perform far below that level in supervised assessment, having never actually acquired the skill. Institutional rules differ sharply — some courses permit AI for checking, some prohibit it entirely, some require disclosure — and the obligation to know your own course's rule cannot be delegated to the tool.
• Data collection is broad and the corporate context is a live public question: The terms set a minimum age of 13, and the privacy policy describes collecting registration details, user content such as photos and comments, chats, contacts and purchase information. Forbes reported that Gauth's privacy policy permits collected information to be shared with other entities within its corporate group. Given ByteDance's ownership and the sustained regulatory scrutiny of its other properties, users and parents in some jurisdictions may weigh this differently than they would for a domestic education vendor.
• Photographs of homework are photographs of your context: A capture of a worksheet can incidentally include a name, a school header, a student identifier or a classmate's work. Crop deliberately.
• Subscription and billing friction is a documented pattern: Recurring reports describe difficulty cancelling and unexpected continued charges. Whatever the underlying cause, treat the subscription as something requiring active management rather than something that lapses quietly.
• Free tier interruptions affect the experience: Advertising in the free tier, including unskippable video, is a frequent complaint in store reviews and interrupts exactly the concentration that studying requires.
• Human expert quality will vary: A distributed global tutor network of that scale cannot be uniform. Response quality depends on which expert picks up your question and how well your question was framed.

FAQ

Q1. Is Gauth free to use?

The app is free to download on iOS and Android and offers free access to core solving, and the web calculator works without installation. However, the free tier is limited rather than unlimited and includes advertising; unlimited explanations and expert access require the paid Gauth Plus subscription. Check the current free allowance in the app, since the official site does not publish a pricing page.

Q2. Who owns Gauth, and is it the same company as TikTok?

Yes. Gauth is owned by ByteDance, the company that also owns TikTok. The app itself is published by GAUTHTECH PTE. LTD., a Singapore-registered entity. This ownership is the reason the product attracts more privacy scrutiny than its features alone would generate.

Q3. Why does the website say gauthmath.com if the product is called Gauth?

Because Gauth is the current brand and Gauthmath was the original one. The product launched in 2020 as Gauthmath, focused on mathematics, and was later rebranded to Gauth as its subject coverage widened. The domain was retained through the change, and the company's own pages still describe it as "Gauth (Formerly Gauthmath)."

Q4. Which subjects does it actually cover?

Beyond mathematics, the official site lists statistics, calculus, physics, chemistry, biology, economics, literature, business, writing and social science. Coverage depth is not uniform across all of these — the mathematics and science areas are the most developed, having been the product's original focus.

Q5. Is using Gauth considered cheating?

That depends entirely on your institution and how you use it. Using it to check work you have already attempted is widely acceptable; submitting its output as your own work is not, and using it during an exam or graded assessment would violate the rules of essentially any institution. Policies differ between schools and even between courses, so verify your specific course's rule before relying on it.

Q6. How accurate are the answers?

Accuracy is genuinely inconsistent, and this is the most substantiated criticism of the product. It performs well on routine, well-posed problems in its core subjects, but independent reviewers and Trustpilot users report confidently presented wrong answers, including on graded work. Never submit an answer you cannot follow and verify yourself.

Q7. What is the difference between the AI and the human tutors?

The AI responds in seconds and handles the bulk of routine questions. The human expert network, available on the paid tier, takes minutes rather than seconds and is intended for harder or more conceptual questions. The tutors are distributed internationally, based in the United States, India, the Philippines and parts of Africa.

Q8. What data does the app collect?

Google Play's data safety panel notes that the app may share app activity with third parties and may collect personal info, app activity and device identifiers. The privacy policy additionally describes registration information, user content including photographs and chats, contacts and purchase information. Data is stated to be encrypted in transit, and deletion can be requested.

Q9. What platforms is Gauth available on?

iOS requiring version 15.0 or later, Android via Google Play, and a browser-based calculator on the official website. There is no documented public API, and no desktop application or browser extension is listed on the official site.

Q10. How do I cancel a Gauth Plus subscription?

Because Gauth Plus is purchased as an in-app subscription, cancellation is handled through your platform's subscription settings — the App Store on iOS or Google Play on Android — rather than solely within the app. Given that cancellation difficulty is the most frequent complaint in independent reviews, confirm the cancellation took effect in your platform's subscription list rather than assuming it did.