Kardo vs Audilingua vs Verbamor: turning a tutor lesson into flashcards

The short answer

Your lessons happen on Zoom, Meet or Teams, you learn a language other than Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese or Russian, or you want to try this for nothing: start with Kardo. Its free plan covers 3 lessons by bot, plus 5 audio uploads a month.

You teach, or you want a summary, grammar tables and a PDF you can print, and you study at a computer: Audilingua. It's free right now.

You study on an iPhone, some of your lessons happen in a room with no laptop open, and you want each new word back as a card with a picture and native-accent audio, on a schedule: Verbamor. It has no free plan, and the price section says what it costs.

I build Verbamor, so weigh what I say about it. Everything about Kardo and Audilingua below is read off their own sites on 25 September 2026. I haven't used either one.

The problem all three go after

A thread on r/languagelearning asked what actually happens to lesson notes after the lesson ends. One learner called it "the same doc graveyard thing": "at lesson 40 now and i maybe opened 3 of them ever." On r/iTalki, a learner who had tried Anki put the other half plainly: "I spend more time creating flashcards than actually studying."

So there are two ways to lose a lesson. Notes you never reopen, and cards that cost more time than they save. All three apps go after both: they read the lesson for you, so there's no doc to forget and no card to type.

The first real difference is how the lesson gets in. The four stages any setup has to cover, app or no app, are in the guide to reviewing vocabulary from lesson recordings.

Getting the lesson in

Kardo sends a bot to the call. You add its email address to the calendar event with your teacher. The bot joins Zoom, Google Meet, Teams or Whereby, listens, and usually emails you a link to your cards within a few minutes of the call ending. Kardo is plain about the obvious question: the bot "joins as a regular participant, so your teacher will see it in the call." It also takes audio uploads (MP3, WAV, M4A), pasted text, PDF and Word files, photos of a page, and YouTube or TikTok links.

Audilingua records on your computer. It has desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux, and a Chrome extension for lessons in the browser. You press record during a video call, an in-person class, or while you play audio back. One recording can run up to 4 hours. You read and practise the results in its web app.

Verbamor records on your phone. You put the iPhone on the table and press record, import an audio file, or paste a transcript you already have. One recording can run up to 90 minutes. Nothing joins the call, so your tutor sees nothing, and asking is on you. Words you meet outside a lesson go in through the Translate tab and become the same kind of card.

Whichever you pick, ask first. Tutors do push back: on r/PreplyTutors, a tutor told a student who was recording that they weren't comfortable with it. italki won't record a lesson itself unless both the teacher and the student agree. Audilingua's own terms forbid recording a class without consent from everyone in it. Record with your tutor's OK.

What you get back

Kardo makes flashcards. It says it picks up "vocabulary, grammar patterns, and idioms," and each card carries the sentence from your lesson.

Audilingua makes a lesson pack. A summary, a vocabulary list with IPA, grammar explanations with conjugation tables, a corrections section, and exercises: flashcards, multiple choice, matching and fill in the blank. It all exports to a PDF with your school's logo on top. That's the richest output of the three, and it's clearly built with teachers in mind. Its February release notes add separate teacher and student views and a student practice portal.

Verbamor makes cards. It transcribes the lesson with speaker labels and pulls out up to 60 words and 30 phrases per recording. You pick the ones to keep. Each becomes a card with the example sentence, the word blanked out, a picture, and 2 native-accent audio clips: one for the blanked front, one full read for the back. The voices are generated in a native accent, and no person records them. It doesn't make conjugation tables or a PDF, and you can't export the transcript.

How the reviews get scheduled

This is the stage that decides whether any of it sticks. Spreading reviews out beats cramming them. Cepeda and colleagues reviewed 317 experiments in 2006, and spacing won.

Kardo says it uses FSRS, "the same spaced repetition algorithm as Anki." One small correction to that framing: Anki ships SM-2 by default, and FSRS is a switch you turn on. With the switch on, the two run the same family of scheduler.

Audilingua's homepage doesn't describe a review schedule. Its flashcards show "Knew it" and "Didn't know" buttons, and that's all the homepage shows. That's silence, and it proves nothing either way, so check inside the app before you count on it.

Verbamor schedules every card with FSRS, with nothing to set up. On scheduling, Kardo and Verbamor tie.

What they cost

Kardo prints its prices in euros, so they stay in euros here. Verbamor's are US prices, read off the app's own plan definitions on 21 September 2026, and your region's App Store may show a different number. Audilingua's "right now" is its own word.

So Verbamor is the only one of the three with no free way in. Kardo's plans are in euros and Verbamor's in dollars, so check today's rate before you set them side by side. And mind the caps: Kardo's Starter plan stops at 8 lessons by bot a month. If you want to spend nothing, the other two win outright.

Side by side

Who should pick one of the others

You want free. Audilingua costs nothing today. Kardo's free plan covers 3 lessons by bot and 5 audio uploads a month, with no card. Verbamor has no free tier. If money is tight, one of those two, or Anki, is the honest answer.

You'd record on your phone anyway. Kardo takes MP3, WAV and M4A uploads, so a voice memo of an in-person lesson can go in there too, 5 a month on the free plan. Verbamor records, transcribes and reviews in one app. Kardo gets you the same start for nothing, with one extra step.

Your language isn't one of the five. Kardo lists 37 and Audilingua takes whatever language the lesson is in. Verbamor teaches 5.

Your lessons run long. Audilingua takes up to 4 hours in one recording. Verbamor stops at 90 minutes.

You're the teacher. Audilingua has PDF handouts and a teacher view, and Kardo has a teacher plan with 90 lessons a month. Verbamor is built for the learner, and it has nothing for the person running the class.

You study at a desk or on Android. Verbamor is an iPhone and iPad app and nothing else. Audilingua reviews in a web app.

And where Verbamor is the better fit: your lessons happen in person and you want one phone app to record them and run the reviews, or you want every word back on your phone as a card with a picture and native-accent audio, scheduled for you. If that's you and your language is one of the five, it's the one I'd pick, and I would say that. The honest comparison with the free option is Verbamor vs Anki, and the short answers to everything else are on the FAQ.

Doing it with no app

You can keep a lesson with none of the three. A learner on r/languagelearning asked how to "retain what you've learned between weekly classes." The answer has two parts, and both have evidence behind them.

Test yourself. In Karpicke and Roediger's 2008 study, students who kept testing themselves on 40 Swahili-English word pairs recalled about 80% of them a week later. Students who kept restudying them recalled 36%.

Space it out. Go back to the new words soon after the lesson, then at wider and wider gaps. That's the Cepeda review above.

In practice: within a day of each lesson, move the new words and your tutor's corrections out of the doc and into a spaced-repetition deck. One learner in the notes thread does exactly that with Anki after every lesson. The cost is the typing, and that's the step all three apps take off your hands. The full routine is in what to do after a language lesson.

Questions people actually ask

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