Apps for speaking practice that get you talking for real
The best apps for speaking practice, from AI tutors to language exchanges to live voice rooms, with honest notes on what each does well and where it fails.
The best apps for speaking practice are the ones that make you open your mouth and talk to another human. For structured drills, ELSA Speak and Speak are good at pronunciation and short answers. For patient, judgment-free rehearsal, ChatGPT's voice mode is honestly the best tutor that never gets tired. For a real partner, Tandem and HelloTalk match you with native speakers, and italki or Preply let you pay a teacher by the hour. And for the part everyone skips, which is talking to several real people at once with no script, I built Hashti: free voice rooms for adults, sorted by language and topic. Below is how I would use each one, and what each one cannot do.
Why speaking is the hard part
I am Armenian-Iranian. I grew up between Armenian at home, Farsi with half my family, and English everywhere else in Los Angeles. I have watched a lot of people, including me, get stuck at the same point in a new language. You can read it. You can understand most of what you hear. But the moment someone asks you a question, your brain locks up.
That is because speaking is a different skill from knowing. You need the words to come out before you have finished thinking about them. The only way to build that is to speak a lot, badly, to people who do not mind. Apps help with this in three different ways, and it pays to know which kind of help you need.
Type one: apps that drill you alone
These are the apps where you talk to your phone and it scores you. They are the safest place to start because nobody is listening.
ELSA Speak
ELSA is built around pronunciation. You say a word or a sentence, and it shows you which sounds you got wrong. If your problem is that people do not understand your accent, this is the most direct tool I know for English. It is narrow on purpose. It will not teach you how to hold a conversation, but it will fix the sounds that stop people from following you.
Speak
Speak is more conversational. It gives you a scenario, you talk through it out loud, and the app responds. It is closer to a lesson than a conversation, and that is fine for beginners who need the scaffolding. The courses are mostly built around English for speakers of other languages, and a few other major languages, so check that yours is covered before you pay.
Duolingo
People ask me about Duolingo for speaking all the time. My honest answer is that it is a vocabulary and grammar app with a few speaking exercises bolted on. The speaking exercises are repeat-after-me, and you can skip them. It is great for building a base. It is not where you learn to talk.
The limit of all of these
A drill app cannot be surprised. It knows what you are supposed to say. Real people do not. The skill you need most, which is understanding a question you did not expect and answering it before the pause gets awkward, cannot be practiced against a script.
Type two: AI you can talk to
This is the newest category, and it has changed my own practice more than anything else.
ChatGPT voice mode
Open ChatGPT, tap the voice button, and tell it "I'm learning Farsi, talk to me slowly and correct my mistakes." Then just talk. It will answer in Farsi, it will slow down if you ask, and it will correct you without any sigh or raised eyebrow. You can ask it to repeat, to explain a word, to switch to English for a second and back. For the middle stage, where you know enough words but freeze when you have to use them, this is the best rehearsal room I have found.
Two cautions from my own use. First, it is too kind. Real people interrupt, mumble, use slang and do not wait for you. If you only practice with an AI you will be shocked by your first human conversation. Second, in smaller languages the AI is not a native speaker. Its Farsi is good. Its Armenian is noticeably weaker, and it will sometimes say things no Armenian would say. Treat it as a very patient classmate, not a teacher.
Other AI tutors
There are dozens of apps that wrap the same kind of model in a language-learning interface, with set lessons and progress tracking. Some are good. I do not want to rank them because they change monthly and I have not tested most of them. The general rule: if the app lets you talk freely and corrects you, it is useful. If it only lets you pick from three canned responses, it is a drill app with a chatbot skin.
Type three: real people, one at a time
At some point you have to talk to a person. These apps make that easier than walking up to a stranger.
Tandem and HelloTalk
Both are language exchange apps. You speak English and want to learn Spanish; someone speaks Spanish and wants to learn English. You take turns. Both apps have text, voice messages and calls, and both have a free tier that is genuinely usable.
What they are good at: finding a partner and getting the first conversation started. What they are bad at: keeping it going. In my experience most exchanges fizzle after a week because both people are busy and nobody is paying anybody. The ones that last are usually with people who became actual friends. Also, be a little careful. Some people on exchange apps are not there to learn a language. Set the boundary early and move on if someone ignores it.
italki and Preply
If you have a budget, paying a tutor is the fastest route I know. On italki you can book a "community tutor," who is just a native speaker willing to chat for a low hourly rate, or a professional teacher who costs more. Preply is similar with more of a structured-lesson feel. Thirty minutes a week with a person who is paid to listen to you struggle does more than three months of solo drills, because you cannot skip the hard parts.
The limit is obvious. It costs money, you have to schedule it, and it is still one person. You get used to one accent and one personality.
Type four: real people, many at once
This is the part of speaking practice that almost nobody does, and it is the part that actually sounds like the real world. A dinner table. A taxi ride. A group of people who are all talking at once and nobody is waiting for you.
That is what I built Hashti for. It is a free app for adults, 18 and over, out now on the App Store, with Android in a closed test. The core of it is public voice rooms with names and topics. You open the app, you find a room in the language you are learning, and you listen. When you are ready, you ask to speak.
Why I think rooms work for speaking practice
- You can lurk first. Listening to real people talk at normal speed about normal things is its own kind of practice. Nobody knows you are there to learn.
- Nobody is waiting on you. In a one-to-one call, silence is painful. In a room with eight people, you can take your time and jump in when you have something to say.
- It is free. Everything about rooms, chats, calls and the walkie-talkie costs nothing.
- The people are real. Every account on Hashti is verified once against a government document. The photo is deleted and a fingerprint stays, so one document cannot make two accounts. Unverified accounts cannot host rooms, speak in voice rooms or message strangers, and twelve verified reports closes an account for good. For language practice this matters more than it sounds. The thing that drove my cousins off other apps was not the language, it was the people pretending to be someone else. You can read more on the safety page.
Where Hashti is weaker for this
I want to be honest, because a list that only flatters my own app is useless to you.
- No lessons, no correction. Nobody in a room is going to stop and fix your grammar. It is practice, not teaching. Pair it with one of the apps above.
- Smaller languages have fewer rooms. English, Farsi and Spanish rooms are easy to find. If you are learning Armenian, the room you want may not be live when you open the app. You can start one, but you might wait.
- Translation is the one paid feature. Live translation covers 29 languages and is part of Hashti Plus, $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. For speaking practice I would actually leave it off. The whole point is to struggle a little. You can see what it does on the translation page.
- The interface is English for now. A Farsi interface is being built. If you cannot read English menus yet, that is a real barrier today.
- iPhone first. Android is still in a closed test.
How I would combine them
If you asked me to set up a speaking routine from scratch, here is what I would do, in order.
1. Week one to four: ten minutes a day on a drill app for the sounds, plus ten minutes talking to ChatGPT about your day. Low stakes, high repetition. 2. Month two: add one real person. A Tandem partner if you have no budget, a tutor on italki if you do. Thirty minutes a week. 3. Month two onward: sit in a Hashti room in your target language a few evenings a week. Listen. Say one thing. Then say two. The first time you make a group of strangers laugh on purpose, in a language that is not yours, you will know the apps did their job.
The order matters less than the mix. Drills fix your mouth. AI builds your confidence. One person teaches you to hold a thread. A room teaches you to survive the real thing. No single app does all four, including mine.
Hashti is free, and it is 18+. Hashti Plus — live translation, writing help and catch-ups — is $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year, and nothing else costs anything. How rooms work is on the rooms page, and how reports and the ID check work is on the safety page.