Starter kit: How to create an AI tutor

Imagine a tutor who never gets tired, remembers every student’s progress, adapts instantly to each learner’s style, and can pull in real-world examples or your own curriculum on the fly.

This isn’t a far-off vision—it’s what you can create today with Tavus Conversational Video Interface (CVI).

With a lifelike AI persona, your tutor can greet learners by name, remember what they studied last session, explain complex concepts through friendly video chats, quiz them in real time, and even adapt lesson plans based on their answers. And thanks to new built-in capabilities like Memories, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), Objectives and Guardrails, and the Persona Builder, building one is no longer a developer-only project.

Technical prerequisites

You’ll need:

• A Tavus account with API access and your API key from the dashboard
• Access to a large language model (LLM) such as GPT, Gemini, Claude, or Llama
• Your lesson content—either public sources, your proprietary curriculum, or fine-tuned models
• A web or mobile platform where you’ll embed your tutor

No deep technical background is required, but familiarity with APIs will help. Tavus handles the heavy lifting for real-time video, conversation management, and persona creation.

Phase 1: Define your tutor’s role and goals

Start by deciding who your tutor is for and what success looks like:

• Audience: K-12, university, professional training, or self-paced learners
• Goals: Boost test scores, improve engagement, or scale access to 1-on-1 help
• Style: Encouraging coach, patient explainer, subject-matter expert

Your choices here will shape:

• Persona behavior (tone, personality, language)
• Objectives and Guardrails (learning milestones, branching conversation paths)
• Content integration (lesson plans, quizzes, examples)

Phase 2: Build your persona with ease

The Persona Builder makes it simple—no coding required. In a conversational setup flow, you’ll:

1. Choose a persona type (e.g., math tutor, language coach)
2. Set voice, appearance, and teaching style
3. Add system prompts to guide tone and explanations
4. Automatically create default Objectives and Guardrails so the tutor knows what to achieve each session

Behind the scenes, Tavus provisions everything you need: a Persona ID, default Replica settings, and a working conversational flow.

Phase 3: Give your tutor memory

A great tutor doesn’t just teach in the moment—it remembers the learner’s journey. With Memories, your AI tutor can:

• Recall which topics each student has already covered
  
• Keep track of strengths, weaknesses, and learning preferences
  
• Pick up exactly where the last session ended, no reintroduction required
  
  

Enabling Memories is simple:

• In the UI: Toggle Enable Memories when creating or editing your persona.
  
• Via API: Add a memory_stores identifier in your Create Conversation call:

Use a unique ID for each learner to ensure their progress stays accurate and separate from others.

Memories turn your AI tutor into a long-term learning partner, capable of building on past sessions instead of starting from scratch.

Learn more about Memories →

Phase 4: Make it knowledgeable with RAG

With RAG, your tutor can pull facts from your documents—curriculum PDFs, CSVs with vocabulary lists, image-based diagrams, or even a scraped website. Just upload them in the Tavus dashboard or via the Documents API:

Assign these documents to your conversation, and your tutor will weave that information naturally into answers.

Phase 5: Map learning paths with objectives and guardrails

An effective tutor doesn’t just talk—it guides the learner toward clear milestones and adapts along the way. With Objectives and Guardrails, you can set measurable goals for each session and define the paths learners can take to reach them.

Here’s how to put it into practice:

• Break lessons into steps such as Explain concept → Show example → Quiz → Review.
  
• Branch based on answers so a correct response moves the learner forward, while a wrong one triggers a follow-up example or extra practice.
  
• Mark objectives as complete automatically once the learner has demonstrated understanding.
• Apply guardrails to keep the conversation focused on relevant material, preventing tangents or off-topic responses.
  

When combined with other Tavus capabilities, the experience becomes even more powerful:

• Memories let the tutor remember which objectives a learner has already completed in past sessions, so it can skip what’s mastered and focus on what’s next.
  
• RAG allows the tutor to pull in precise, curriculum-aligned examples and practice problems from your uploaded documents at each step of the path.
  
  

You can design these flows visually in the Tavus dashboard—perfect for quickly testing new lesson structures—or edit the JSON directly for complex, conditional branching. Either way, Objectives and Guardrails ensure the tutor stays focused, responsive, and always moving the learner toward their goals.

Phase 6: Connect content and assessments

Once your tutor can talk and remember, it’s time to make sure it teaches with the right material and adapts as learners grow. With Tavus CVI, you can connect it to:

• Public APIs for trusted educational resources (like Khan Academy)
  
• Your own curriculum files uploaded through RAG, so the tutor always references accurate, up-to-date content
  
• Dynamic quizzes and guided problem-solving generated in real time
• Define content-specific goals so each assessment maps directly to a desired skill or competency
• Use guardrails to ensure assessments stick to approved content sources and align with your curriculum
  

Here’s where the new features make a big difference:

• Memories let your tutor recall what a learner has already studied and how they performed on past quizzes, so future assessments build on that history.
  
• RAG ensures every question, hint, or explanation is grounded in your specific curriculum—not just general knowledge.
  

For example, after walking a learner through a new concept, your tutor might say:

“Want to try a quick challenge problem based on what we covered last time?”

If the learner says yes, the tutor delivers the quiz, checks the answer, and uses Objectives and Guardrails to decide the next step—moving forward if they’ve mastered the concept, or revisiting it with fresh examples if not.

This creates a continuous loop of teaching → checking → adapting, powered by long-term memory and your own content library, so every lesson feels personal, relevant, and ready for whatever the learner needs next.

Best practices

• Keep prompts simple so explanations are clear and jargon-free
  
• Use Memories + RAG together for a truly personalized, informed tutor
  
• Review analytics to see where learners struggle and refine content
  
• Support multiple languages for broader reach
  
• Ensure accessibility with captions and alternative formats

Building with Tavus CVI

Most AI tutors today still feel flat—chat bubbles on a screen or avatars with canned responses. With Tavus CVI, you can start building toward something more:

• Real-time, lifelike video personas that feel present in every interaction
  
• Persistent memory to carry context forward and retrieval-augmented knowledge to ground answers in your own content
  
• Guided conversation flows that help learners reach clear, measurable outcomes
  
• A no-code builder for quick starts and full API control when you’re ready to customize deeply
  
• Enterprise-grade privacy and compliance so you can serve even the most sensitive audiences confidently
  
  

These capabilities don’t just help you launch an AI tutor quickly—they open the door to evolving it over time. As your content, learners, and goals change, Tavus CVI gives you the flexibility to adapt, expand, and keep creating learning experiences that feel more human, more personal, and more effective.

Start building today

Define your persona, turn on Memories, upload your content with RAG, set your learning objectives, and integrate your tutor where learners already are.

With Tavus CVI, anyone—educators, creators, organizations—can create a tutor that feels real, teaches effectively, and scales effortlessly.

Ready to converse?

Get started with a free Tavus account and begin exploring the endless possibilities of CVI.

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