The best AI apps to practice speaking English

What you need to practice speaking English

How hard is English? That depends on your first language. English isn’t in our ranking of 67 languages, because the ranking measures how hard each language is for English speakers. But you can read it from the other side. Spanish (2,941 effort points), French (2,969) and Dutch (3,422) are among the easiest for English speakers, and they share lots of words with English. Japanese (10,097) and Korean (7,870) are among the hardest. So if you speak Spanish or Dutch, lots of English words will look familiar. If you speak Japanese or Korean, expect a longer road.

Either way, the hard part for most learners isn’t reading English. It’s speaking it, at full speed, in a real conversation.

• Phrasal verbsEnglish loves short verbs with a little word after them: get up, give up, find out, run out of. People use them all the time, much more than the long word you learned: find out, not discover. And one verb can mean many things: you look up a word, look after a child and look forward to the weekend.
• Spelling that doesn’t match the soundThough, through, tough and thought look alike, and they all sound different. Read today sounds like reed. Read yesterday sounds like red. You can’t trust the letters, so you want to hear a native speaker say your sentence.
• Tenses that work differentlyLots of languages say “I live here since three years”. English says I’ve lived here for three years. And is it I saw it or I’ve seen it? The rule fits on one page. Getting it right while you talk takes practice.
• American or BritishAn apartment in New York is a flat in London. The elevator is the lift, and fall is autumn. You hear it, too: Americans say the r in car, most people in England don’t. Both are right. So pick a teacher who sounds like where you’re going.
• Lots of English you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: videos, podcasts and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeLots of people read English well and still freeze when they have to speak. School gave them the words, not the practice. A few minutes a day won’t fix that. You need hours of real conversation.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your English. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch English YouTube videos and podcasts, and read stories written at your level. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itKnowing a word isn’t the same as using it, in the right tense, with the right little word after the verb. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every wordYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many words to your next level.

Brand new to English? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn the basics with a course like Duolingo, which is free and taught from over 30 languages, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in English

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

A card for every word you tap

Tap any word, in a conversation, a video or a story, and you get its card: what it means, what kind of word it is, an example, and a tip. Tap play to hear it.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your English teachers

Eighteen teachers. Pick American or British English first, then the person you’d like to talk to. Ten speak with American voices, from Claire in Chicago to Marcus in Austin and Maya in Atlanta. Eight speak with British voices, from Ella in London to Evelyn in Birmingham. Olivia from Los Angeles has a realistic face, so you see her speak as you chat.

Some are AI versions of English teachers you might know from YouTube: Shayna from Espresso English, Greg from English with Greg, and Anna from English Like A Native. We built those with them. Plus language people you might know: Benny Lewis from Fluent in 3 Months, and our co-founders Olly Richards and Xiaoma. They learned many languages themselves, so they know where you get stuck.

Every teacher is bilingual. Stuck? Ask for an explanation in your own language, then go back to English.

American teachers, with American voices

• 
  Claire Morgan

  Chicago · American
• 
  Daniel Jorge

  Denver · American
• 
  Ethan Park

  Seattle · American
• 
  Kevin

  Taipei · Taiwanese
• 
  Marcus Reed

  Austin · American
• 
  Maya Bennett

  Atlanta · American
• 
  Olivia Williams

  Los Angeles · American
• 
  Shayna Oliveira

  North Carolina, USA · American

  Espresso English
• 
  Vanessa Prothe

  Asheville, North Carolina · American
• 
  Xiaoma

  New York City · American

  Xiaomanyc

British teachers, with British voices

• 
  Anna Tyrie

  Surrey · British

  English Like A Native
• 
  Benny Lewis

  Travels the world · Irish

  Fluent in 3 Months
• 
  Ella English

  London · British
• 
  Evelyn Smith

  Birmingham · British
• 
  Greg Pioli

  Yorkshire · British

  English with Greg
• 
  Michal Bocian

  Wiązowna · Polish
• 
  Noah Brown

  Denver · British
• 
  Olly Richards

  Devon · British

  StoryLearning

Input: English to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of English you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to an English YouTube video, or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan we transcribe it for you, within a monthly allowance.
• Suggested for youNot sure what to watch? Suggested for you lists English videos by topic, each with the share of words you’d understand.
• Stories written for youRead writes English texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher. Or import your own: an article, a book, a photo of a page.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every English word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. It checks every word of a video or text against that list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people learn English on Duolingo. Good! So here’s how the two compare for speaking, with every Duolingo fact from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Speak · Teacher AI vs Praktika · Teacher AI vs Langua · Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedRussianWith the stress marked above every wordTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending