How to practise English speaking with AI: the drills that work, the best apps and how to choose one (2026)

Most people who cannot speak English can already read it. They know the grammar, they have the vocabulary, and they still go quiet when somebody asks them a question. That gap is not knowledge, it is retrieval speed: finding the word while a person waits is a different skill from recognising it on a page, and it is trained only by doing it under time pressure.

That is the one thing an AI is genuinely good for. It gives you the time pressure, in volume, at a price no human can match, and it will not sigh when you take four seconds to find a word. Thirty minutes a day with an AI is more speaking than most learners get in a month of classes.

What it does not give you is a reason to care. A person who is waiting for your answer, who will misunderstand you if you get it wrong, who might laugh — that pressure is real in a way a patient machine is not. The honest position is that an AI is the gym and conversations with people are the sport.

Talk for three minutes without stopping. Pick a topic, start, and do not pause to look for a word. When you cannot find one, say something clumsy and keep going. The point is not the quality of the three minutes, it is training yourself out of the freeze. Most people discover they can say almost anything if they stop trying to say it well.

Ask for one kind of correction at a time. A machine that corrects everything at once produces a wall of feedback you will not read. Ask for articles this week, verb tenses next week, prepositions after that. One category, repeated until it stops appearing, beats a complete report you skim and forget.

Retell something instead of discussing it. Listen to two minutes of anything and tell the AI what was said. This forces you to produce structures you did not choose, which is what a real conversation does and what a free-form chat never does — in an open chat you steer towards the words you already own.

Rehearse the conversation you are actually afraid of. Not "travel" or "technology" but the specific thing: the call to the landlord, the interview, the moment at the counter when the person asks something you did not expect. Practising the situation you dread is worth ten sessions of pleasant small talk about hobbies.

Repeat the correction out loud. When the AI gives you a better phrasing, say it. Reading it does nothing. The mouth has to make the shape before it belongs to you, and that is thirty seconds of work most people skip.

Using a general assistant without telling it what to do. Out of the box, ChatGPT and its cousins are built to be agreeable. They will understand your broken sentence, answer it warmly, and never mention that it was broken. If you use one, tell it every session: correct my important mistakes, ask me one question at a time, do not switch to my language. Without that instruction you are having a pleasant chat, not a lesson.

Practising in text because it is more comfortable. Typing gives you time to think, delete and rewrite — the three things a real conversation removes. If you can write well and speak badly, more typing will not close that gap; it is the gap.

Choosing topics you can already handle. Comfortable topics feel like progress and are not. If you finish a session without once being stuck, the session was too easy.

Never repeating anything. A mistake corrected once and never seen again is a mistake you will make again next month. Whatever tool you use, the thing that moves your level is the same error coming back until it stops appearing — which is why memory across sessions matters more than any single feature.

Collecting apps instead of using one. A subscription you open twice is worse than a free tier you open daily. Almost nobody needs two speaking apps; the honest exception is pairing a conversation app with a pronunciation tool, because those genuinely do different jobs.

You freeze when someone speaks to you. You need volume and immediate correction, not lessons. Gliglish gives ten minutes a day with no account at all; ChatGPT's voice mode gives you a capped allowance if you instruct it properly every time; Fluvia corrects you mid-sentence rather than in a report at the end and brings your repeated mistakes back.

People ask you to repeat words. That is pronunciation, and ELSA is the specialist. It is not a conversation app and it does not pretend to be. Using it alongside a conversation app is the one pairing worth paying for twice.

You want structure and a path. Speak is built as a course with an order to it, in exchange for a subscription and no permanent free tier. Praktika does something similar with avatar tutors, behind a card.

You want a person. HelloTalk is free for most of what it does, and the catch is that your partner corrects whatever they feel like correcting, whenever they feel like it. It is the cheapest way to get real stakes and the least reliable way to get feedback.

You are not sure yet. Start with whatever asks for nothing. Gliglish and Fluvia both let you talk without an account or a card, which means you can find out in five minutes whether being corrected while you speak is what you have been missing.

Every figure in the table was read on each app's own pricing page or store listing, on the date above. Prices and free tiers move; this table is re-checked and re-dated when they do.