Tarko AI can mean three unrelated things. Most people searching the name want TarkoAI at tarko-ai.com, a study app for Indian CBSE students in Classes 8 to 12 that turns notes into video lessons, podcasts, quizzes and exam plans, with a Pro plan at $25 a month. Developers are more likely looking for Tarko at tarko.ai, ByteDance's open-source agent runtime behind UI-TARS and Agent TARS. A third company, TARKO at tarkoai.com, sells machine-vision inspection systems for factories.
| Name | Website | What it is | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| TarkoAI | tarko-ai.com | AI study app for CBSE Classes 8–12 | Students and parents |
| Tarko | tarko.ai | Open-source agent runtime framework | Developers building agents |
| TARKO | tarkoai.com | AI visual inspection for manufacturing | Factories and quality teams |
TarkoAI Study App Review
TarkoAI covers CBSE Classes 8 to 12 in Physics, Chemistry, Maths, Biology and Science. Its FAQ says JEE, NEET, ICSE and state boards are "coming later". You can study in English, Hindi or Hinglish, and science terms stay in English as they appear in the exam. The site links to iOS and Android apps and claims more than 50,000 students.
You start by giving it material: a photo of handwritten notes, a PDF, a YouTube link, pasted text or a ready-made NCERT chapter. The site says each tool output is ready in about 20 seconds.
The 8 study tools
| Tool | What you get | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Video lesson | About 5 minutes, explained out loud with drawn formulas and graphs | Pro |
| Podcast | About 10 minutes, with chapters and a transcript | Pro |
| Mind map | Whole chapter as linked ideas | Pro |
| Quiz | 5–20 questions with an explanation for every answer | Free to try |
| Flashcards | 5–20 cards that come back when you start to forget them | Free to try |
| Summary notes | 1–3 pages of what the exam asks | Free to try |
| Practice paper | Timed paper in the CBSE board pattern, 30 minutes or 3 hours | Pro |
| Oral test | Viva-style spoken questions, 5 or 10 | Pro |
Three more features sit around the tools:
- Exam prep. Enter the exam and date, and Tarko splits the chapter into daily steps of about 20 minutes, reshuffles if you miss a day and ends with a marked board-style paper.
- Previous year papers (PYQs). Students upload old tests (photos or a PDF of up to 12 pages). Tarko blacks out names, roll numbers, signatures and photos first. Free users can open 3 other tests, plus one more for each test they add; Pro opens all of them and lets you practise any paper.
- Lessons and Ask Tarko. Each NCERT chapter is cut into short lesson pages, and you can highlight a line and ask Tarko to explain it, including in Hinglish, or send a photo of a problem.
TarkoAI pricing
Prices from the pricing section of tarko-ai.com on October 22, 2026:
| Plan | Price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0, no card needed | 3 Ask AI questions, one upload, and one quiz, flashcard deck, summary or exam prep (first 2 steps) |
| Pro monthly | $25 a month | Every exam prep, unlimited Ask AI, 5 GB of uploads, video lessons, podcasts, mind maps, practice papers, oral tests, all PYQs |
| Pro yearly | $120 a year ($10 a month) | Same as monthly; the page labels it "Save 60%" |
Pro is paid by card and renews automatically; you can cancel from your profile and keep Pro until the end of the paid period. Students under 18 need a parent's consent, and a parent can approve and pay from a link the student sends.
Strengths and caveats
- Strengths: built around the CBSE syllabus and board-exam pattern, works from your own notes, Hindi and Hinglish support, and a free tier that does not ask for a card.
- Caveats: only CBSE is covered for now. Most of the tools are Pro-only, so the free tier is a short trial. The site itself says that, like any AI, it can make mistakes and that the textbook and teacher remain the final word. The research figures on the homepage are about AI tutoring and self-testing in general, not studies of TarkoAI.
Errors can be reported to support@tarko-ai.com.
Tarko Agent Runtime (tarko.ai)
Tarko stands for "Tool-augmented Agent Runtime Kernel, Open-source". It is a framework for building agents driven by tool calls and an event stream. Its documentation lists five building blocks:
- Context Engineering for long-running agents, with automatic context compression and state persistence
- Tool Call Engine that works across LLM providers, including models without native function calling
- Event Stream with native streaming
- Agent Hooks for changing behaviour at each stage of execution
- Agent Protocol as a standard format for the agent lifecycle
The architecture has three layers: an engineering layer (CLI, server and UI), an application layer (agents built on Tarko) and a kernel layer. Tarko powers UI-TARS-2, UI-TARS-desktop and Agent TARS. The quick start installs it with npm install @tarko/agent and needs Node.js 18 or newer; the latest npm version on October 22 was 0.3.1. The code lives in ByteDance's UI-TARS-desktop repository (Apache-2.0, 39,368 stars), which you can follow on AI Rank.
TARKO Machine Vision (tarkoai.com)
TARKO builds turnkey AI inspection systems that sit beside a production line, spot defective parts with industrial cameras and edge computers, and signal the machinery to reject them. The site describes a rollout of one to two weeks of data collection, one to two weeks of model training and a one-week hardware install. It advertises under 12 ms latency per frame and a 99.97% average accuracy rate; those are the company's own figures. It has nothing to do with the study app or the agent framework.
FAQ
Is Tarko AI free? TarkoAI (tarko-ai.com) has a free tier with 3 Ask AI questions, one upload and one quiz, flashcard deck, summary or exam prep to try. Videos, podcasts, mind maps, practice papers and oral tests need Pro at $25 a month or $120 a year.
Does TarkoAI support JEE or NEET? Not yet. It covers CBSE Classes 8 to 12, and the FAQ lists JEE, NEET, ICSE and state boards as coming later.
Is Tarko the same as UI-TARS? No. Tarko is the runtime framework; UI-TARS-desktop and Agent TARS are products built on it.
Are tarko-ai.com and tarko.ai the same company? Nothing on either site links them. One is a CBSE study app, the other is ByteDance's open-source agent framework.
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Sources
- TarkoAI (tarko-ai.com)
- Tarko introduction and quick start
- bytedance/UI-TARS-desktop on GitHub
- @tarko/agent on npm
- TARKO machine vision (tarkoai.com)
Prepared with automated editorial assistance and checked on October 23, 2026 against tarko-ai.com, the tarko.ai documentation, GitHub, npm and tarkoai.com. The TarkoAI app was not purchased or tested.