Real build · Ravela Thai
A Thai-language app, built end to end — tone coach, apps, website, payments.
Ravela Thai teaches people to actually speak Thai, tones and all. We built the whole thing alongside Pook, the Thai tutor whose teaching the app is built around: brand, product, website, app, payments and content engine, end to end. It listens to you speak and scores your tones against a native speaker in real time. It's live on the App Store, on Google Play, and it runs in a browser with nothing to install. It's here because it answers the only question that matters when you're choosing who builds your site: can they actually build the hard part?
The product site. One idea, stated in one line, before anything is asked of the visitor.
Why it exists
Every other Thai app teaches you to tap. None of them listen.
Thai is tonal. The same syllable said five ways means five different things — say máa when you meant maa and "come" becomes "horse". Every mainstream language app scores you on whether you picked the right tile. None of them check the one thing that decides whether a Thai person understands you: the shape of the sound coming out of your mouth.
So the product had one non-negotiable requirement from day one — it has to hear you. Everything else was built around that.
- Tap-the-right-tile drills and streak mechanics
- No feedback on pronunciation at all
- Vocabulary that evaporates between lessons
- Nothing built specifically for Thai's tone system
- Live tone scoring — your voice drawn against a native target
- Audio on every single word and phrase
- Spaced review that keeps words alive between lessons
- A 24/7 AI tutor that roleplays real conversations and corrects you
What we built
A full product, not a prototype.
Courses, lessons, vocabulary and flashcards, all served from a content engine so new material ships without a rebuild — plus the parts that make a learning product actually stick.
- 01
Tone coach
Real-time pitch feedback on the tones that change meaning. Runs on the device, in the browser, with no signup.
- 02
AI tutor, 24/7
Roleplay real situations — order food, take a taxi, talk to the in-laws — with instant correction.
- 03
Structured courses
A full curriculum with audio on every word, built by a real Thai tutor rather than scraped from a word list.
- 04
Spaced review
Flashcards that resurface words at the point you're about to lose them — the gap every other method leaks through.
- 05
Content engine
New courses and video lessons publish straight into the app every week without touching the codebase.
- 06
Memberships & billing
A genuinely usable free tier, paid plans on top, and the entitlement logic that keeps the two honest.
Six features, one argument: everything aims at getting real Thai out of your mouth.
The hard part
Scoring a human voice, in a browser, in real time.
This is the piece that made the product worth building and the piece that took the longest. The tone coach captures your voice, extracts the pitch contour, and draws it against the native target so you can see the shape you actually made — not a score out of ten, the line itself.
Try it before you sign up for anything.
It sits on the marketing site, live, with no account and no download. That's a deliberate decision: the single fastest way to prove a claim like "it hears your tones" is to let someone test it in eight seconds while they're still deciding whether to believe you. Every business has a version of this — the thing you can let a stranger try instead of describing.
Shipping it
Three platforms, one build.
The web app came first, so people were learning on it long before any app store had an opinion. The same build then went out to iOS and Android — and it still works in a browser for anyone who'd rather not install anything.
- App StoreDownload Ravela Thai for iPhone ↗
- Google PlayGet Ravela Thai for Android ↗
- In your browserOr just open it at ravelathai.com ↗
Built with Pook, a Thai tutor with 1,600+ lessons taught — she brought the teaching, we brought the technology.
In their words
What Pook said.
So happy with the website and app that was built and now live on the app stores. Fast and exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!!
PookRavela Thai
Why this matters to you
What this build proves.
- We ship, we don't just design. This one went all the way to two app stores and a live billing system, not to a mockup.
- The hard technical end is in-house. Real-time audio analysis, entitlements, a content engine — no subcontractors, no hand-offs.
- We stay in the room after launch. Every decision here comes back to us in support tickets, same as it will on yours — nothing gets built to look good in a screenshot.
- The same thinking goes into a site from £175. Let people try the thing. Remove the steps between interested and using it. Own your own platform.
Got an app idea?
Websites are what we do day to day, and that's where most businesses should start. But if you've got something that genuinely needs an app behind it, tell us about it — we'll give you a straight answer on whether it's worth building, and the route we'd take to get there. Start a conversation →
Free · no call · nothing to book
Want this level of thinking on your website?
Send us your site — or just your Instagram — and we'll rebuild a few of your pages properly and send them back as a link. Free, with a note on what we changed and why.
