The best AI apps to practice speaking Italian

What you need to practice speaking Italian

Good news first. In our ranking of 67 languages, Italian is the 58th hardest for English speakers, at 3,244 effort points. Only nine languages are easier, Spanish, French and Portuguese among them.

Loads of words look like English: importante, possibile, informazione. And you read it the way it’s written. But a few things catch everyone out.

• Double lettersIn Italian, a double consonant is held longer, and it changes the word. Caro is dear, carro is a cart. Sete is thirst, sette is seven. Nono is ninth, nonno is grandpa. You only learn to hear it, and say it, by talking.
• Essere or avereThe past tense needs a helper verb, and it’s not always “have”. Ho mangiato, I ate, but sono andato, I went. And with essere, the ending follows you: a woman says sono andata. Everyone gets this wrong for months.
• Little words that change“The” has seven forms: il, lo, la, l’, i, gli, le. And they melt into the word before: in + il is nel, di + gli is degli. In a conversation, there’s no time to work it out.
• False friendsA camera is a room. Your parenti are all your relatives, not just your parents. And preservativo isn’t what’s in your jam. That’s a conservante.
• Lots of Italian 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 timeEven an easier language takes hours of talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

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 Italian. 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 Italian 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, with the right article and the right helper 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 Italian? 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 (free), Babbel or Pimsleur, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Italian

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, its forms, and an example with a translation. 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 Italian teachers

Thirteen teachers, from all over Italy: Turin, Venice, Verona, Rome, Genoa, Milan and Foggia. Sofia from Milan has a realistic face, so you see her speak as you chat.

And Italian teachers you might know from YouTube: Davide Gemello from Podcast Italiano, Francesco Cositore from Vaporetto Italiano, and Stefano from Learn Italian with Teacher Stefano. 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’ll get stuck.

• 
  Benny Lewis

  Travels the world · Irish

  Fluent in 3 Months
• 
  Davide Gemello

  Turin · Italian

  Podcast Italiano
• 
  Edoardo De Santis

  Venice · Italian
• 
  Francesco Cositore

  Ferrara · Italian

  Vaporetto Italiano
• 
  Giulia Ferrari

  Verona · Italian
• 
  Irene La Preziosa

  Rome · Italian
• 
  Leonardo Russo

  Turin · Italian
• 
  Matteo Bianchi

  Genoa · Italian
• 
  Michele Frolla

  London · Italian
• 
  Olly Richards

  Devon · British

  StoryLearning
• 
  Sofia Rossi

  Milan · Italian
• 
  Stefano

  Foggia · Italian

  Learn Italian with Teacher Stefano
• 
  Xiaoma

  New York City · American

  Xiaomanyc

Input: Italian to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of Italian 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 Italian 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 youWatch suggests videos by topic, from channels made for learners, like Italiano Bello, Vaporetto Italiano and Italiano Automatico, to comedy, food and the news. Each one shows the share of words you’d understand.
• Stories written for youRead writes Italian texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher. There’s today’s news, too.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Italian 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, names and numbers aside, 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 start Italian 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 Langua · Teacher AI vs Praktika · 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 polyglotsGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith 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