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Free English speaking app: what each one gives you free

November 12, 2026, 12 minute read

You can read English. You follow films, emails and meetings. Then someone asks you a question out loud and the sentence will not come. One learner put it this way on Reddit: "I understand ~18 out of 20, but still feeling I know nothing about English." Understanding and speaking are different skills, and only speaking out loud trains the second one.

A free English speaking app is a phone or web app that lets you practise spoken English without paying, by giving you someone to talk to: an AI voice, an AI face, a human tutor or another learner. The catch is the word "free". In most apps it means a free download, a short trial or a free tier that rations the talking. Below is exactly what each app gives you without paying, as of November 2026, checked on each vendor's own page or its US App Store listing.

How we checked these prices

Every competitor figure above comes from the vendor's own website or its US App Store listing, read on 12 November 2026. App Store pages list in-app purchases without saying which region or plan each one belongs to, so where a page shows several prices for the same plan, the table gives the plainest monthly and yearly items. ELSA's page, for example, lists yearly items from $71.00 to $129.99. Praktika lists ten purchase items from $6.99 to $139.99. Prices change by country and by promotion, and Speak says so on its own site: "Pricing varies by plan, region, and any current promotions."

Where a vendor does not say what its free tier includes, the table says "not published" rather than guess. That applies to Praktika's free tier and to the price of Duolingo Max.

The fastest way to compare is to hear one. The englishmaa warm-up below is free for 60 seconds, and the rest of this post explains what you will hear.

What "free" really means in each app

ELSA Speak

ELSA has the most generous free plan for one job: scoring how you sound. Its site lists a free individual plan that includes a "Speech analyzer with detailed feedback and test-score predictions." Exam preparation and the full course sit behind Premium, which the App Store listing says you can "start for free with a 7-day trial." If you want a number next to each word you say, ELSA is built for that.

Speak

Speak is honest about its model. The site says it "offers a 7-day free trial, after which a paid subscription is required to continue." During the trial you get "Speak's core learning features." After that you pay. It is a structured course: learn phrases, practise them, then use them with an AI tutor.

Praktika

Praktika shows you AI tutor characters and talks back out loud. The App Store page says "Free to download. Start your first conversation in minutes." What the free version includes is not stated by Praktika itself. Its site compares its price, "~$8/ month", with "~$400/ month" for a private human tutor.

Cambly

Cambly is a marketplace for human tutors. The app is free to download, but the lessons are the product, and we found no free lesson stated on its pages. The group-lesson page we could load showed euros, not dollars: €8.00 a lesson on a monthly plan, down to €3.69 a lesson on a yearly plan, with 30-minute lessons. If you need a real teacher who can explain why, Cambly is the right kind of app.

HelloTalk

HelloTalk is the strongest answer to "free" if you want real people. Its site says you can "practice for free by chatting with native speakers around the world," through "text, voice, or video," plus voice rooms and livestreams. VIP costs $12.99 a month. The trade-off is that your partner is also a learner with their own goals, and conversations depend on who replies.

Duolingo

Duolingo's courses are free, and that is real. Speaking out loud in a conversation is a different matter. Video Call with Lily, its AI character, "is available to Duolingo Max subscribers." Calls "last about a minute" early in a course and "could last up to 3 minutes" later, and Duolingo says "you won't hear her correct your grammar."

englishmaa

englishmaa gives you the first 60 seconds of a live call free, with no card and no sign-up. That is short on purpose: it is enough to hear the tutor, say something back and decide. It is not a trial that turns into a bill. After that, minutes are counted and paid for, because the talk time is the whole product.

What a call on englishmaa actually looks like

Most comparison posts list features. Here is what happens in a real call, so you can judge it before you spend anything.

You open the Daily warm-up at /practice/warmup/. A tutor appears with a face that is drawn and lip-synced on your own device. After saying hello, the tutor's first line is exactly this:

Quick warm-up. Tell me about something that happened yesterday. Take about a minute.

Then you talk. Out loud, into your microphone. There is no text box to hide behind. The tutor answers out loud too, and the call follows a few fixed rules:

• Short replies that ask back. The tutor keeps its own turns brief and hands the conversation back to you with a question, so most of the talking is yours.
• One fix at a time, after you finish a thought. The tutor does not cut in mid-sentence. It waits until you finish, then picks one thing.
• You try first. Before giving you the better version, the tutor nudges you to fix it yourself.
• Notes after every call. You get what went well, up to two fixes, and one phrase to keep.

The warm-up goal is simple: "Answer one question for a minute, then say it again, shorter and clearer." The call is capped at three minutes. The two can-do lines it trains are "Talk for a minute without stopping" and "Say the same thing again, shorter and clearer."

Why the "you try first" rule? A classroom study by Lyster and Ranta (1997) found that teachers mostly used recasts, simply saying the correct form back, and that recasts were weak at getting students to repair their own speech. Prompts such as elicitation, clarification requests and repetition "lead to student-generated repair more successfully" (Lyster and Ranta, 1997). That is why the tutor asks before it tells.

This sits between two extremes in the table. Duolingo's Lily does not correct your grammar at all. A scored-speech app like ELSA puts a mark on every word. englishmaa gives you room to talk and then one thing to work on.

Which app fits you

No single app is best for everyone. The right one depends on what you are short of.

Choose ELSA Speak if you want pronunciation scores

If your question is "how exactly do I sound?", ELSA is built to answer it, and part of that is on its free plan. englishmaa does not score pronunciation. It works on being understood the first time, and an accent is not a fault.

Choose Speak if you want a course that tells you what to do next

Speak leads you through phrases first, then practice. If you are a beginner who needs words before conversation, a course shape helps. The 7-day trial is enough to know whether the method suits you.

Choose HelloTalk if you want real people and pay nothing

Nothing in this list beats HelloTalk on free human contact. If you are confident enough to start conversations with strangers, and patient when they do not reply, use it.

Choose Cambly if you want a human teacher

A good human tutor can explain grammar, notice patterns across weeks and push you in ways an app cannot. If that matters most and you can pay per lesson, Cambly is the category to look at.

Choose Duolingo if you need a daily habit

Duolingo is very good at getting people to open it every day. For speaking practice in a real conversation, though, you need Max, and the calls are short.

Choose englishmaa if you freeze when you have to speak

If you already understand English and the problem is the moment you have to answer out loud, you need reps of exactly that moment: a face, a question, and you speaking. englishmaa has situations from small talk and travel to a job interview, a team meeting update, a negotiation and a phone call with a client. Each call ends with notes and a suggested next situation.

How to learn English speaking for free

You can make real progress without paying anything. The free tools above are enough if you use them in the right order.

1. Talk to yourself for one minute a day. Pick yesterday as the topic. Record it on your phone. Listen once.
2. Say it again, shorter. Tell the same story a second time in fewer words. This is the same exercise as the Daily warm-up, and it costs nothing to do alone.
3. Find one free human. Use HelloTalk's free voice messages or calls with a native speaker a few times a week.
4. Use a free scorer if sounds worry you. ELSA's free plan will flag the sounds to work on.
5. Make it public. Posting a short clip each day keeps you honest. Our free 30-day speaking challenge is built on this: post one short speaking clip a day with #englishmaa30, and finish 30 posts within 40 days.

The challenge also gives you 4 free tutor minutes a day while you are in it, and finishers get the englishmaa year for $49 instead of $99. Places open a few at a time, and others join a waitlist. If you want the plan on paper first, the free PDF "The 30-day English speaking challenge" is at /resources/30-day-english-speaking-challenge/. For the wider method, read how to speak English fluently.

"Why pay at all when free apps exist?"

That is the fair question, and the honest answer is that you might not need to. If HelloTalk partners reply, if you can record yourself every day, and if you are comfortable speaking to strangers, free is enough.

Most people who search for a free English speaking app are stuck on a different problem. They are not short of content. They are short of a safe place to say the sentence out loud, many times, with someone who answers back. Free peer apps depend on someone else's time. Free AI tiers in this list are either a trial, a scoring tool or a short call on a paid plan.

That is the gap englishmaa fills, and it is why the pricing is in minutes, not features. The 30-day pass is $19 in one payment for 600 minutes, and it never renews. If you only need a month of practice before an interview or a move, that is the whole cost. The yearly plan is $99 for 4,300 minutes. And before either, you can try 60 seconds without a card.

FAQ

Key takeaways

1. A free English speaking app usually means a free download plus a trial or a limited tier. Read what is actually free before you install.
2. HelloTalk is the best free option for real people, ELSA's free plan is the best free option for pronunciation feedback, and Cambly is the place for a human tutor.
3. If you understand English but freeze when you speak, you need reps of the moment you have to answer. That is what a live call with englishmaa trains, and the first 60 seconds are free.

Sources

• ELSA Speak, US App Store listing: in-app purchase prices and the 7-day trial, read 12 November 2026.
• ELSA Speak website: the free individual plan and its speech analyser.
• Speak, US App Store listing: Premium and Premium Plus prices.
• Speak website: the 7-day trial and the paid subscription after it.
• Praktika, US App Store listing: in-app purchase prices.
• Praktika website: its own price comparison with a human tutor.
• Cambly, US App Store listing: free download, no in-app prices listed.
• Cambly group lesson plans: per-lesson prices and lesson length.
• HelloTalk, US App Store listing: VIP prices.
• HelloTalk website: free practice with native speakers by text, voice or video.
• Duolingo, US App Store listing: free courses and Super Duolingo prices.
• Duolingo blog, Video Call: Video Call with Lily is for Max subscribers; call length and correction.
• Lyster and Ranta (1997), Corrective feedback and learner uptake: which feedback types lead learners to repair their own speech.
• Reddit r/ENGLISH, "I understand ~18 out of 20, but still feeling I know nothing about English.": the learner quote in the opening.