Speak is the most serious speaking-first competitor here — with roleplays that are Speak’s, not yours.
Prices verified 30 July 2026 · US iOS App Store| Saygood | Speak | |
|---|---|---|
| Open-ended live conversation | ✓ | ~around set objectives |
| Real-time speech-to-speech | ✓ | ✓ |
| Interrupt mid-sentence | ✓ | ~we could not verify |
| Slang dial | ✓four steps | ✗ |
| Speaking-speed dial | ✓four steps | ✗ |
| Patience dial | ✓ | ✗ |
| Corrections dial | ✓ | ✗fixed by the lesson |
| Immersion dial | ✓five steps | ✗ |
| Change the dials mid-call | ✓ | ✗ |
| Partners you invent | ✓ | ✗ |
| Scenarios you write | ✓ | ✗Speak’s, not yours |
| Level from a spoken call | ✓from a 5-minute call | ~built from your lessons |
| Recap carried to the next call | ✓ | ✓after each session |
| Structured course | ✗in build — August 2026* | ✓ |
| Languages | 20+ | Fewer · English-first |
| Platforms | iPhone · online only | iPhone, Android, web |
| Price, US iOS | $29.99/mo · $199.99/yr | $17.99–39.99/mo |
Of the 14 things above, Saygood does 13. Speak does 3, plus 3 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.
Speak teaches you to speak, on its objectives, with its tutor, in its scenario. Saygood is a call with a partner you invented, in a situation you typed, with five dials you can move mid-sentence.
There is a real curriculum in there, and pronunciation feedback down to the syllable. We work at the level of ‘here is what to fix’, not phoneme scoring.
Also true, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Premium is cheaper than us, it is on Android and the web, and it has years of users behind it where we have none.
you want a course that tells you what to do next, or you care about pronunciation scoring.
you have the words and the grammar and cannot get them out at conversational 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.
A roleplay has an objective Speak set, a character Speak wrote, and an end. A Saygood call has whoever you invented — a name, a city, a job, opinions — in a scenario you typed in yourself, and it runs until you hang up. You can also move how fast they talk, how much slang they use, how patient they are and how hard they correct you, mid-call, which is the part no course-shaped product offers because the course has to hold those constant to grade you.
Speak, comfortably. It has a graded course and it will not drop you into an open conversation you have no vocabulary for. Come to us the moment you can form a sentence — not once you have finished, because there is no finishing.
It makes it well-resourced, which is not nothing, and by Speak's own account its roleplays run on a realtime speech model — so we are not going to claim a latency advantage we cannot demonstrate. The difference we are pointing at is a product one: whose conversation it is, and how much of it you can change while it is happening.
A higher tier at $39.99/mo or $164.99/yr on iOS, above Premium at $17.99/$83.99. Check in the app for what is currently in each — tier contents move around more often than prices do.
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.