Tutors Teach. AI Does the Rest: How Voilà Removed Commissions from Language Tutoring

Voilà is an AI-powered platform for language tutors and their students. It brings lesson planning, multilingual transcription, AI lesson summaries, scheduling, payments and a tutor marketplace into one place. Tutors can teach in Voilà’s own classroom or inside Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams. 

Online tutoring marketplaces such as Preply and italki run on a different model. Voilà’s pricing comparison shows Preply keeping between 18% and 33% of every lesson, and italki keeping 21% of single lessons and 30% of group classes. On top of that, many tutors run each lesson across Zoom, Google Docs, Calendly and ChatGPT, then handle prep, notes and follow-up by hand. 

Voilà replaces the commission with a flat fee and the patchwork of tools with one platform. Between lessons, students keep practicing with an AI learning partner that knows exactly what they covered in class, available on WhatsApp or Telegram. 

The payoff? One AI-powered platform in place of 5+ tools, built to handle 42 language variants. 

Voilà didn’t start with tutors. It started with a pair of glasses. When Google announced Android XR, its extended reality (XR) platform for smart glasses, Voilà set out to build a language app that listens to a learner’s real conversations and gives instant feedback, instead of relying on repetitive drills. The glasses weren’t on sale yet, and Navtech came in from day one to build for them anyway. 

Voilà later refocused that technology on language tutors and ran into three long-standing problems. 

The first was incentives. A marketplace that takes a percentage of every lesson earns more from volume, whether or not students improve. 

The second was language. Generic transcription breaks when a lesson switches between two languages. In Voilà’s benchmark on a bilingual English-Portuguese lesson, Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai and Google Meet all mangled or dropped the Portuguese. A bad transcript leads to wrong corrections and wrong progress notes. 

The third was adoption. Tutors run established businesses on tools they already know, and moving to a new platform is a lot to ask.

Navtech’s first build was the XR experience, developed on the Android XR SDK ahead of the hardware, with an integration pipeline for Ray-Ban Meta and Google XR glasses. With the learner’s permission, the AI spots mistakes in their spoken conversations, sends a quick summary of what to improve, and suggests content suited to where they are. A companion app grew around it, with an AI tutor that learns each learner’s level, interests and repeated mistakes. 

When Voilà turned to tutors, Navtech built the platform from scratch. It includes a classroom with automatic note-taking, an AI Teaching Assistant, multilingual transcription, scheduling, payments and a marketplace. A browser extension brings the same AI into Google Meet, Zoom and Teams. 

Everything rests on the transcript. Built on Google’s Gemini models, Voilà’s transcription correctly distinguishes tutor from student and holds up through the language switching that tripped up the tools in Voilà’s benchmark. Each transcript feeds AI lesson summaries, vocabulary and progress tracking, and conversation starters for the next class. The AI Teaching Assistant builds full lessons in seconds, and Gemini speech-to-text powers pronunciation practice. 

Payments run through Stripe Connect, which secures each payment before the session and handles refunds according to the tutor’s cancellation policy. Tutors who prefer bank transfer (IBAN) or cash can record those payments instead. Rather than taking a commission, Voilà charges tutors a flat $1.99 per 50-minute session, and nothing if they don’t teach. Students find tutors by describing their goals in a conversation with an AI, which matches them on teaching style, personality and availability. 

Between lessons, the Voilà Learning Partner on WhatsApp and Telegram reads each student’s lesson history and practices with them by text, voice notes or live calls.. That includes roleplay calls where the AI plays a waiter, a job interviewer or a doctor. Tutors set the week’s focus, and students whose tutor teaches on Voilà get it free. 

Switching is easy. Tutors keep their video tools and payment methods, and a new profile goes live within an hour. 

Generic AI can transcribe a lesson. Navtech built AI that understands one.

Tutors feel the difference in their earnings. On a $30 lesson, the tutor keeps $28.01 after Voilà’s flat fee. Voilà’s earnings calculator shows a tutor billing $1,800 a month keeping $1,680.60 on Voilà, compared with $1,206 on Preply at its top rate of 33% and $1,422 on italki at 21%. That’s about $475 more every month than on Preply. Group classes carry a flat 15% fee, half of italki’s rate. 

Students get more from every lesson too. For someone paying $20 to $40 per lesson, the Learning Partner turns each lesson into practice that carries on all week, at no extra cost. More than 500 tutors signed up within two months of launch. 

“AI has changed everything about building software, but you still need people who show up, ask the right questions and know what to look out for. That’s what we get from Navtech.” 

Paul Commons, Founder, Voilà 

It’s still early for Voilà, but it already shows how far a capable team can go with AI behind it: taking on long-standing incumbents with a model that succeeds only when tutors do.