How accurate is TonePerfect?
TonePerfect has not published an accuracy figure. Its scores are a practice signal for comparing your own recordings over time and finding your weakest sounds, not a certification or an exam grade.
Last checked
Each score comes from aligning your recording with the text you were asked to say and scoring each word and each sound, by how close it is to a native model, from 0 to 100. The scores rank your own sounds against each other so you know what to practise first. Compare a score with your own earlier scores in the same language, not with another app's score or a score in another language.
Results depend on the recording. A phone or laptop microphone is enough in a quiet room; the situations listed below make any automatic check less reliable, so record again if a result looks wrong.
A practical way to judge any pronunciation checker, TonePerfect included, is to try to fool it on purpose. For Mandarin tones it takes two minutes.
What makes a score less reliable
- Background noise, music or other voices.
- A clipped start, when the recording begins after you have started speaking.
- Whispering, which has no voiced pitch to measure.
- In Mandarin: very creaky third tones, and neutral tones, which are short and take their pitch from the syllable before.
- Very fast connected speech, where words and syllables run into each other.
Check any tone checker yourself in two minutes
- Go somewhere quiet, hold the microphone close and speak at normal volume.
- Pick a word whose tone you know, for example 马 mǎ (horse), and record it with the right tone.
- Record the same word again with a deliberately wrong tone: say mǎ as mà, a sharp fall.
- A checker that hears tones must mark the second take wrong, and a good one tells you which tone it heard. If both takes score the same, it is not judging the tone.
- Repeat each pair three times. One take can be off; the pattern over three takes is what counts.
- For a harder test, use a two-syllable word such as 电话 diàn huà and say only the second syllable wrong (diàn huā). The checker should flag that syllable, not the first.
- To run it on TonePerfect, type 马 or 电话 into the practice page.
What it does not do
- No accuracy figure or benchmark is published, so this page quotes none.
- Scores are not an exam grade, and not a CEFR, HSK, JLPT or TOPIK level.
- Japanese pitch accent is not scored.