Memrise is the vocabulary app with thousands of clips of real people, and an AI chat bolted on top.
Prices verified 30 July 2026 · US iOS App Store| Saygood | Memrise | |
|---|---|---|
| Open-ended live conversation | ✓ | ~turn-based |
| Real-time speech-to-speech | ✓ | ✗ |
| Interrupt mid-sentence | ✓ | ✗ |
| Slang dial | ✓four steps | ✗ |
| Speaking-speed dial | ✓four steps | ✗clip playback |
| Patience dial | ✓ | ✗ |
| Corrections dial | ✓ | ✗ |
| Immersion dial | ✓five steps | ✗ |
| Change the dials mid-call | ✓ | ✗ |
| Partners you invent | ✓ | ✗ |
| Scenarios you write | ✓ | ✗ |
| Level from a spoken call | ✓from a 5-minute call | ✗ |
| Recap carried to the next call | ✓ | ✓spaced repetition |
| Structured course | ✗in build — August 2026* | ✓ |
| Languages | 20+ | 20+ |
| Platforms | iPhone · online only | iPhone, Android, web · offline |
| Price, US iOS | $29.99/mo · $199.99/yr | $24.99/mo |
Of the 14 things above, Saygood does 13. Memrise does 2, plus 1 in part.
✓ yes ~ partly ✗ no
* Roadmap, not a shipped feature — and scored as a loss for us until it ships. If a date slips we will change this line rather than quietly leave it up.
Memrise is the best vocabulary tool here and its spaced repetition beats our recap. It is also not a conversation — the chat is turn-based, and if you can already read more than you can say, words are not your problem.
Thousands of short videos of ordinary people speaking at normal speed in the accent they actually have. Nothing we do replaces that, and it directly closes the gap between textbook audio and real life.
Also true, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is far cheaper — $61.99 a year, and a $329.99 lifetime that costs less than two years of Saygood.
you are building vocabulary, or you want to hear how real people actually say things.
your vocabulary is fine and your problem is getting it out at speed.
A course is a good way to get your first few hundred words. The mistake is staying there for two years. Speaking is a separate skill from recognising, it is the slowest one to build, and the only way to build it is to talk to someone who is not waiting for you — as early as you possibly can.
I speak five languages and I have tried more or less everything under the sun to learn them — courses, flashcards, tutors, every app in this comparison set that I could get my hands on. The gap that never got closed by any of it was the same one every time: actually speaking, in real time, to someone who is not waiting for you. That is the only reason Saygood exists.
No. Memrise's chat is text-first with speech added, and the app's centre of gravity is vocabulary review. Saygood has no vocabulary system at all and exists to run a live voice call you can interrupt, with a partner you wrote. They solve adjacent problems.
On iOS: $24.99/month, $61.99/year, or $329.99 for lifetime access. The annual is substantially cheaper than ours and the lifetime option is worth considering if you plan to keep at it.
Memrise, if you do not yet have the words — there is no point practising delivery of vocabulary you do not have. But start calling as soon as you can form a sentence rather than waiting until the reviews are clear. Words come back fast; speaking does not.
They are the closest thing in an app to realising that nobody speaks the way your textbook does. If that is your specific frustration, Memrise addresses it more directly than anything else here. The step it cannot take is making one of those people talk to you and wait for an answer.
Not today, and that is the honest answer — you open the app, pick someone, and talk. One is in build, and it is deliberately not another course: rather than a library of lessons, it works out what you can and cannot say from the calls you have already had, and steers the next conversation toward the gap without ever showing you a lesson screen. The first piece — a spoken level taken from a real five-minute conversation instead of a multiple-choice quiz — is due in August 2026. If that date moves, this page moves with it.
Yes, and it is the single most underrated thing in the app. Slang is a dial in Saygood — mostly clean, everyday, street, full slang — and you can move it in the middle of a call, along with speaking speed, how patient they are, and how hard they correct you. Courses teach the careful, neutral, written register almost exclusively, and that is not the register anybody speaks to you in. Learning only that version of a language is how people end up fluent on paper and lost in a bar.
Ten minutes of calling, free, no card. That is enough to find out whether talking to an AI partner does anything for you.