Best apps for English pronunciation in 2026
Most English apps teach you words and grammar and hope your pronunciation improves on its own. It usually does not, because the sounds that cause trouble — th, r and l, the vowel pairs, word endings — are physical habits that need direct work. Here is what each of the main tools is genuinely good at, including where ours is the wrong choice.
По каким критериям
- Does it give feedback on how you sound, or only on what you know?
- Is the feedback per sound, or only on the whole word or sentence?
- Does it tell you what to do with your tongue, lips and breath?
- Can you hear real speakers say the exact word you are stuck on?
- What does it cost, and is the free tier usable on its own?
ELSA Speak
A daily pronunciation habit on your phone
A well-known app built specifically for English pronunciation. You speak into it and get feedback on the sounds in what you said, with drills organized around them. It is the most direct competitor to what we do, it has a large library of exercises, and full access is a paid subscription.
italki
A teacher who corrects you while you speak
One-on-one video lessons with English teachers and tutors, booked and paid by the hour. A teacher hears everything at once — sounds, rhythm, and whether the sentence works — and can answer questions no app can. It is the most effective option here and the most expensive per hour.
Speechling
Recorded practice reviewed by a human coach
You record sentences and a human coach sends back feedback. It sits between an app and a tutor: slower than a live lesson, but more specific than any automatic score, and useful if speaking live makes you nervous. The free tier limits how much coach feedback you receive each month.
Duolingo
General English practice and staying consistent
Free, gamified lessons covering vocabulary, reading and grammar, with speaking exercises included. Those exercises check that you said roughly the right thing, not how clearly you said each sound. Good for keeping a daily habit; not a pronunciation tool.
BBC Learning English
Free video lessons that show you the mouth
A free site and YouTube channel from the BBC, with short pronunciation videos that show how each English sound is made, alongside general English lessons. Excellent for understanding what you are supposed to do. Nothing listens to you, so pair it with something that does.
YouGlish
Hearing a word said by many real speakers
A free website: type a word or phrase and it plays clips from real videos where people say it, and you can choose between varieties such as American and British. Perfect for checking how a word sounds in real speech instead of in isolation. It is a listening tool, not a practice loop.
TonePerfect
Это мыFinding out which sounds are making you hard to understand
You record real English words and the engine scores every sound inside them, then shows which ones need work and how to physically make each one. The English scoring is validated against human experts: on a public research dataset of 2,500 recordings from 250 learners, each rated by five human raters, the engine's per-sound judgments agreed with the human ratings at an AUC of 0.906, where 1.0 would be perfect agreement. The limits, plainly: it trains pronunciation only — no grammar, no vocabulary, no conversation practice — and it gives no IELTS, TOEFL or CEFR score, and does not grade your accent or push you toward one identity.
Итог
If you want one free thing to start with, watch the BBC Learning English pronunciation videos to learn what each sound is, and use YouGlish to hear it in real speech. If you want feedback on how you actually sound, that is what ELSA Speak and TonePerfect both do — TonePerfect scores each sound and its English scoring is checked against human expert ratings, and it also covers seven other languages if you study more than one. If a human can look at your speech, take that instead: Speechling for written-in feedback at low cost, italki for a real lesson. And keep using a general course for the language itself, because none of the pronunciation tools on this page will teach you grammar or vocabulary.