ELSA Speak Review: High-Tech AI App for Developing an American English Accent
I learned English as a second language, and the toughest part was mastering pronunciation.
So I wanted to see if the AI-based ELSA Speak app would help me sound more like a native speaker. After all, Forbes declared it as one of the top AI companies that could change the world, and it even won funding from Google.
What I found was the app did target weaknesses in my pronunciation—but with a few drawbacks.
Contents
- What ELSA Speak is All About
- How Lessons in ELSA Speak Work
- Other Features of the App
- Pros and Cons of ELSA Speak
- Pricing
- Alternatives to ELSA Speak
- So Is ELSA Speak Worth It?
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What ELSA Speak is All About
ELSA Speak is a mobile app for English learners looking to improve their pronunciation. One of its founders is a speech technologist, so the app uses AI to systematically analyze your pronunciation and then gives you personalized exercises.
For example, when you speak out loud to the app, it can check whether you’re pronouncing specific letters wrong or even applying stress on the wrong syllable.
One catch is that it’s only for American English—there’s no support for British English.
Still, ELSA Speak is meant to handle all levels of English learners. It has a huge collection of more than 25,000 exercises and learning materials.
I’d mainly recommend it for pronunciation, but it also has other features that enhance your speaking in general and even teach you new vocabulary. You can practice video interviews on the app, learn about commonly confused words and even have free-flowing conversations with an AI chatbot.
The app’s pretty cutting-edge, so it’s constantly improving. In fact, Forbes declared it as one of the top AI companies that could change the world. It even won funding from Google, which is why I’ve been looking to try it.
How Lessons in ELSA Speak Work
Speaking Test and Daily Lessons
As you’d probably expect, you have to do a speaking test first so the app can check your level.
I was actually curious about my results since I’ve been learning English for a while:
The test only takes less than ten minutes, but I was impressed at how cleanly it broke down which sounds I was having trouble with. It also pointed out clearly that there was still room for improvement in my intonation.
Once you receive your results, the app gives you a neat list of lessons to get started with.
I went straight into the “Daily Lessons” section, where ELSA Speak chose five lessons for me to practice that day:
My first impression of the app was that the technology behind it is very cool—but it also has so much content that it’s overwhelming figuring out which ones to tackle. This is where the “Daily Lesson” comes in.
Even though ELSA Speak has thousands of modules and lessons, you’ll see the same types of exercises come up again and again.
Pronunciation Exercises
Pronunciation exercises are at the heart of the app. You’ll practice specific sounds first, then you’ll build up to words, phrases and then full-on sentences.
These involve speaking out loud to the app, then it’ll tell you whether your pronunciation is correct:
I was pretty surprised by this because I didn’t know I was pronouncing the word “caused” incorrectly!
If you get it wrong, the app gives you a detailed explanation of how it should sound like. This can be confusing at first, though, and it’d sometimes take me several tries before I got correct pronunciation:
Other Types of Exercises
Aside from pronunciation exercises, you’ll also encounter the following:
- Listening Check — This is very helpful because you have to tell apart two similar-sounding words (like “wish” and “witch”). I had a bit of trouble with “year” and “ear”!
- Stress Practice — Stress is an incredibly important part of English pronunciation, even though it’s often overlooked. For example, the app might ask you to practice saying “average,” with the stress on the first syllable.
- Sentence Intonation — If stress is tricky, then intonation is even trickier to learn! You’ll be given a sentence and then taught which words you should be emphasizing.
- Conversation Game — The app comes up with a simple conversation, and you have to read the responses out loud. You can choose from diverse topics, including weekend plans and the pros and cons of higher education.
I enjoyed the variety of exercises because practicing never got too routine.
The sentence intonation and conversation game exercises seemed less useful for me, though.
A lot of users have complained that the sentence intonation exercises are too strict—even native speakers don’t do well in them sometimes!
The conversation game exercises made me feel like I was just repeating sentences out loud without absorbing how to use them in real life:
Choosing Lessons on Your Own
Aside from the daily exercises, you could choose lessons yourself from the app’s huge catalogue. There are two types: Improve Pronunciation and Studying by Topic.
The “Improve Pronunciation” lessons are more systematic, focusing on specific sounds like the schwa or TH sounds. These might even have video tutorials or detailed written explanations so you’ll be clear on how to pronounce each sound:
Studying by Topic gives you situation-based lessons, such as ordering coffee, using common English slang and even doing job interviews. There’s even a dating module!
All of these lessons still follow the same format as the personalized daily exercises. They’re not arranged by level, though, so it can take some clicking around to figure out which ones work for you.
Other Features of the App
ELSA Speak’s main focus is improving your pronunciation, but there’s a lot more that you can get out of the app, especially if you have a premium subscription that unlocks all of its features.
You can leverage the app to get more speaking practice in English (and be more confident the next time you’re talking in English to another human):
AI Conversations
Right at the top of the homepage, you’ll see AI conversations being advertised.
I find this feature much more useful than the original conversation practice exercises because you’ll be forced to come up with your own responses.
For each conversation, the AI will ask you open-ended questions about a specific topic, such as “What kind of party do you want to have?” or “If you encounter conflict at work, how would you resolve it?” You would then have to answer out loud, with the app converting your responses to a chat message.
ELSA Speak describes this feature as like having your own conversation tutor since the conversations are very spontaneous.
The app can even identify if the response you gave fits the situation well (or not).
English Certificate Courses
If you’re about to take an official English-speaking exam, ELSA Speak can help you study well for the speaking portion.
It features detailed review material for most of the major English-speaking exams, including TOEFL, IELTS and TOEIC, with more than 100 modules each.
There’s even a business English course that’s based on official textbooks by Oxford University Press.
Games, Dictionaries and Study Sets
Admittedly, given the massive amount of lessons available, I don’t think I’d realistically use these remaining ELSA Speak features as much.
Games include options like Missing Letters and Word Shuffle, where you have to guess what a word is based on its shuffled letters:
There’s even a dictionary that’s pronunciation-focused. When you look up a word, you can watch videos of people pronouncing it or even have the app check your pronunciation.
Finally, ELSA Speak also lets you save vocabulary from exercises into study sets. They’re similar to pronunciation-based flashcards since the app will quiz you on how to pronounce them.
I didn’t find them very useful, though, compared to flashcards from other language learning apps.
Pros and Cons of ELSA Speak
Now that I’ve walked you through the main features of ELSA Speak, here’s my overall impression of the app:
Pro: Systematic and Science-Based
English pronunciation is difficult to master for a reason, even for advanced learners. It’s hard to get specific feedback on what you need to improve on! Native speakers can tell right away if your accent is off, but they won’t always be able to pinpoint why exactly.
ELSA Speak uses a science-based method to assess which part of your speech you need to improve on. You’re constantly getting detailed feedback about your English pronunciation, and the exercises it suggests are picked out for you specifically.
Even a human tutor wouldn’t be able to do this in such a detailed way.
Pro: Diverse Exercises
ELSA Speak relies a lot on pronunciation drills, but even after a week straight of logging onto the app, I never found it boring because there’s a wide variety of exercises. You can practice your listening, learn how to talk about pets or even chat freely with AI about your college experience.
Another unique feature was their video call lessons. While saying conversational lines out loud, video snippets appear to make it seem like someone is on a Zoom call with you.
Pro: Genuinely Helpful for Pronunciation
With so many language learning apps touting impressive taglines these days, it’s normal to be skeptical, but I felt like my pronunciation was improving after a week.
As an advanced English learner, I thought my pronunciation was pretty good but not perfectly native-like, and ELSA Speak gave me a concrete roadmap for getting better at it.
The schwa sound often trips up English learners, and yet it’s essential to sounding like a native speaker. As I kept doing the exercises, I was hitting the schwa sound more consistently.
The app also gives encouraging feedback, which helps with feeling more motivated.
Con: Overwhelming Amount of Content
This is my biggest gripe with ELSA Speak. I love how it has so many lessons, but they can still improve their app design so a new user wouldn’t struggle with feeling bombarded by all the information.
The first time I used it, I got overwhelmed because there were so many options for lessons.
On top of this, the pronunciation lessons had IPA symbols for their titles, which English learners wouldn’t necessarily be familiar with.
Con: Speech Algorithm Sometimes Inaccurate
For the most part, their speech algorithm seems pretty good, and it always caught my errors.
The downside is that it can be a bit too strict. Many native speakers—even those who are English teachers with a standard accent—say that the app only gives them a score of around 80% or less.
It’s also easier to pronounce words and phrases correctly, but once you practice intonation with sentences, the app gets a bit too rigid.
ELSA Speak is based on the textbook American accent, so if a native speaker’s accent deviates from that, they’ll likely get marked down.
Pricing
There are three pricing options for ELSA Speak: Free, Pro and Premium.
Free is very limited because you don’t get to access most of the lessons. It feels more like a “sampler” of the app.
For most users who are planning to use it regularly, the next tier—Pro—would probably be the most suitable choice. You’ll have access to all of the lessons as well as daily recommended practice.
Premium—the highest tier—makes the app’s other features unlimited for you, like AI speaking practice and even all of the English exam preparation courses.
ELSA Pro is at around $19.99 per month, while Premium is a few dollars higher. Here’s the app’s pricing page for more info.
If you’re not sure about subscribing, ELSA Speak lets you try out out some exercises on the website, and there’s also a seven-day free trial.
Alternatives to ELSA Speak
BoldVoice
BoldVoice is one of the closest competitors to ELSA Speak, but it has much more of a human touch.
It still relies on AI-powered speech recognition to give you feedback on your pronunciation, but it also includes video lessons from actual humans—specifically, accent coaches from Hollywood.
Say It
Say It, an app by Oxford University Press, teaches you both the American and British accents.
Instead of AI, it assesses your pronunciation through soundwaves. When you speak out loud, the app generates a soundwave chart, which you can compare with that of a native speaker.
Speechling
If you want to get listening and speaking practice as well, Speechling is worth looking into. This long-running program lets you record yourself saying a sentence in English, and then a native speaker will give you personalized feedback.
The sentences function as flashcards, so you can review them and learn some grammar and vocabulary too.
FluentU
Getting a lot of input from how native speakers talk is also part of improving your pronunciation. FluentU immerses you in over a thousand lessons with authentic listening content from English movies, TV shows and more. These are suggested to you based on your level.
The app even lets you practice your pronunciation with quizzes after each video that include speaking questions.
So Is ELSA Speak Worth It?
If you’re serious about improving your English pronunciation, ELSA Speak is one of the most reliable apps you can download. The AI-based feedback is helpful and personalized, and there are always new exercises to try.
It’s a bit on the pricier side, requiring a subscription to be usable, so you’ll need to be committed to regular practice to make it worthwhile.
While it has lessons for beginners, most of its content is geared towards higher-level learners, as the pronunciation lessons often assume more advanced vocabulary.
Just keep in mind that it’s mainly for getting your English speaking closer to a standard American accent—and you’ll still want to combine it with other resources if you’re aiming to reach speaking fluency!
