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italki is Dead to Me

italki, like so many great services for language learners, is dead. Well, not dead dead, but it’s heading that way.

italki was a great service that connected language learners with amateur and professional teachers from around the world.

Now it’s a mess that underpays teachers to fund its useless AI.

The Degradation of italki

Back in 2014 when I started using italki all I had to do was log in, look up potential teachers, check out their offered classes, profile, and available class times, and book a trial.

It was super easy. Super effective. No muss, no fuss.

I was a HUGE supporter of their services. (You can still read my review of italki from 2015 when it was good.)

Then, in 2025, they completely changed their entire system to incorporate degenerative AI and destroyed any functionality in their UI to make the website impossible to use.

 

What Happened to italki?

The aggressive push to force generative AI into every single thing is unmissable. AI tech companies promising things will be so much faster and cheaper if you implement their AI services! But it doesn’t help with speed or cost, all it does impact the quality—for the worse.

And all the other language learning apps were doing it, so italki had to do the same or be left behind.

Generative AI services were forced into italki in 2024 as a premium only service. They offered learners a way to get summaries of their classes and told teachers that it could make lesson plans for them. But generative AI is nothing more than a random word generator. It can’t actually summarize or design a language learning class as well as a teacher. So, this feature was ignored by most users.

Then, in September 2025, they decided to take it one step further and implemented AI into everything.

The desktop website was instantly changed to look like a mobile app, ruining page layout and usability. Everything was overhauled, the search bar, messages with teachers, teacher summaries, past/future lessons, everything that made the site easy and useful. A lot of people complained on reddit, including a number of teachers who said their students had quit italki because of the influx of slop.

They even added an annoying AI “fish” that’s supposed to gamify italki and make you feel guilty for neglecting it. You know, the Duolingo method of guilt motivated language learning through slop instead of offering a useful service.

Options that were once easy to find were now purposefully hidden so you were forced to use the AI chat bot to find anything.

The italki website and app became trash overnight and people were angry.

The new version is terrible! It is too busy, too much going on! I will see how much longer I stay on this platform, no thank you!

 

The Backlash

Users instantly went to Reddit and social media to call out the changes. italki were inundated with complaints and in response encouraged people to email them.

But when many did, myself included, there was either no response, or a very flat “we’re sorry you feel this way.”

Someone inside the company let slip that the CEO was digging his heels in and insisting the backlash will cool down eventually.

Instead, people just quit.

Reddit post: New Italki Update Maybe I'm just an old man now, but today the Platform changed and the page is just overwhelming and almost unusable (at least from the student's side). AI is now being shoved down our throats on every page, they are asking me to pay $59/yr for 'plus' and it takes up half the page and I can't remove it. When searching through tutor profiles before, the profiles were arranged 1 by 1 in a row, they are now 3x3 and if I make the mistake of hovering over any of the tutor videos they start autoplaying. The ensh*tification of everything continues. Really disappointed with this update from the student's side. Once my credits run out I'll likely delete my account.

Reddit post: Reply: "You should email them and tell them you hate it. Be specific." Reply: "That was the first thing that I did. Only received a generic 'we're sorry to hear that you don't like the update', and 'valuable feedback', etc. I thanked the person for their time and told them that I'd be deleting my account." Reply: "I think that's how you kill the learning fish"

 

One Step Forward Two Steps Back

italki did respond to the backlash a little, and fixed most of the UI issues, but not all of them. They also kept their broken AI search function and the stupid guilt-tripping fish.

Not to mention as of the end of January, italki made it mandatory to record everyone’s classes when taken on italki. Only those in regions with laws that prevent programs from recording you without permission could turn it off. But when if you can turn this “feature” off in the settings, it was discovered by users that italki still records your lessons.

Many teachers and students suspect italki are using these recordings to train their generative AI so they can create AI teachers that will someday replace the human teachers that keep the site running.

Reddit post: Mandatory recording of all Italki Classroom lessons goes against GDPR in the EU Hi everyone, Italki’s updated teacher and privacy policies (https://teach.italki.com/privacy) make lesson recording in Italki Classroom mandatory, with no option to disable it. This was announced a week or so ago and I haven't seen much discussion of it apart from a couple of posts here, so I thought I'd make another one. Agreeing to this new policy is required to continue teaching. There's a strong argument that this is illegal in the EU under GDPR. - Under the GDPR, consent to recording must be freely given. “Agree or stop working” doesn't qualify. - Proportionality: recording every minute of every lesson by default isn't necessary for the service to function - Power imbalance: Teachers are independent contractors, not employees, yet are subject to continuous recording without choice. Italki says recordings are used to create lesson summaries, materials, and exercises. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the ultimate idea is to use our labour to train an AI model which in future will be able to give basic conversation lessons, replacing the less specialised language teachers on the platform. In short, any personal information and educational materials that students or teachers share in the classroom is being recorded and used by Italki to train their AI tools. Personally, I'm not anti-AI at all - the questions here is consent. What's happening here is non-optional recording of professional activity, involving voice and image data, with no opt-out and limited transparency. I think this is something teachers - especially EU-based ones - should question and potentially challenge. At the very least, if anyone (student or teacher) is uncomfortable with a Chinese company recording and storing everything that goes on in the classroom, they should use a more private alternative video platform to do the class.

I have the following privacy settings however AI summaries are still being generated. As someone who works in software development the only way for that to happen is for at least audio to be recorded and then fed into an AI model. This means that they are recording all lessons if only one person opts into their recording policy, since this is the default with students, that means in most cases recordings will go ahead on the platform. All of this, the opt in by default, the one sided consent are firmly against GDPR rules and these clear violations continuing despite 'efforts' to fix the situation show that italki doesn't care about the regulation. I'm sure the regulators will enjoy these details when they uncover them.

 

Unfortunately the teachers who have made a living off italki’s platform have been hit the hardest. Not only by this gross mishandling of the service forcing students to quit, but also the pay cut italki forced on them to pay for the AI “upgrades”. (italki used to take 15% commission, but recently changed to 21% for single lesson fees plus and a 4% fee to withdraw their money from their italki account.)

 

What Now?

And there aren’t many convenient alternatives. Many users have had to find local teachers or classes, or find similar services based in different countries.

I’ve moved to local classes offered by a school in my city, but not everyone has the time or flexibility to go to school.

There is Preply which is similar to italki, but charges a subscription fee instead of per lesson. Which isn’t ideal for people like me who can’t commit to regular lessons for a whole year, only sporadic ones.

Some online alternatives for Japanese learners are:

Note: I haven’t tried these services so can’t comment on their quality.

 

italki is Dead to Me

I really hoped italki would revert to their old website, but despite the fixes to some of the UI issues, they’re still doubling down on AI slop. So, I’m quitting and deleting my account and any reference to them on this site (besides this article).

I’m lucky that I live in a large city in Japan and can easily access local teachers and classes in Japanese and Korean. Although I’m going to miss my current teacher, who is amazing.

But I don’t want to fight the website every time I want to find a teacher or book a lesson. I can’t support a service that is willing to screw over their users and teachers, the humans who use their site to learn languages, for degenerative slop.

 

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