Talkpal review: in-depth testing by a language learning expert
Spoiler: it’s mostly negative!
→ If you’d prefer to listen to and watch this review, there’s a video version here: https://youtu.be/4zKMR0MJgtQ
Talkpal is one of the more successful “AI language tutors” that have appeared in the last few years. It currently has 4.7 stars on the app store but after you’ve heard what I’m going to reveal in this article, I think you’ll be confused as to why it gets so many good reviews.
The only reason I discovered these negatives was because I was testing it in my native language, which I guess most users won’t be doing.
I’m a qualified English teacher, with a degree in Linguistics & Phonetics and I’ve been developing language learning technology for more than 15 years. I really believe it’s important to hold language learning apps to high standards to make sure that they’re genuinely helpful for the people who use them.
Positives about Talkpal
First, let’s focus on some positives. What’s good about Talkpal?
It has a nice clean and organised interface, including some AI generated images of beautiful people, which are certainly pleasant to look at. They also have a lot of different types of speaking activities, which keeps things interesting. For example roleplays, audio-only call mode, describe a picture.
All that means that, at first glance, Talkpal looks impressive. But, I wanted to test it more thoroughly, specifically the advice that it gives about grammar and pronunciation. When I did that, I discovered that it sometimes gives misleading and inaccurate advice which most of the users are probably not aware of. I’m going to show you some examples.
Talkpal’s grammar feedback
Firstly, grammar corrections. I tested this with texts written by real English learners that contain lots of typical mistakes. As with AI grammar corrections in any app, the AI occasionally misses mistakes or corrects things that are not wrong.
For example, in the screen shot below, it missed that we need “it” before “may be” and that “may be” should be two separate words in this context.
Like I said, this will be true in any similar app (I know, because I’ve tested a lot of them!) but, what I don’t like, is that Talkpal doesn’t explain that to their users. Other similar apps do include warnings about this. For example the apps, Elsa, Often and even ChatGPT itself.
I also felt that in Talkpal it’s very difficult to see what your mistakes were. Your eyes have to skip back and forth between your text and the corrected text to compare them. Other apps, including Often, make it much clearer.
Talkpal’s grammar advice summaries
Talkpal sent me an email summary of my practice with some advice about which grammar points I should focus on improving. This email contained some complete nonsense that was wildly inaccurate.
Look at the screenshot below. It told me to “work on using articles correctly” in “without any doubt”. Articles are the words “a” and “the”, so this is not a mistake with articles.
It also told me to “be mindful of prepositions” regarding a so-called mistake where it (completely unnecessarily) told me to use “believe” instead of “think”. That has nothing to do with prepositions, so here it’s just layering bad advice on top of bad advice!
I emailed Talkpal to ask them for a response about this. I’ve put their response below.
I believe that while they work on improving the app, they should be more honest and warn users that the AI might give them bad advice sometimes.
Also, I asked them that question about 2 months ago and they’re still sending these useless and incorrect summary emails to users, so they’re doing it knowingly.
Talkpal’s pronunciation feedback
The feedback Talkpal gives about pronunciation was especially inaccurate and useless. I chose the “Sentence mode” which includes pronunciation feedback and I said 24 of the phrases I was shown.
Sometimes I used my native English voice and sometimes I pronounced the sentences using common mispronunciations and non-native accent features that I’m used to hearing from my pronunciation students.
Of the 24 phrases, it only gave, what I would call, an accurate assessment of about 6 of them. Very disappointing.
Just like with the AI grammar corrections, the AI pronunciation feedback sometimes missed incorrect pronunciation and sometimes picked up on things which were pronounced well, even in my very standard native English accent.
If you want to see and hear examples of this, I’ve put them in this video. (You can skip to 4:40 for the pronunciation examples)
In terms of pronunciation advice, the whole thing is completely unreliable. I don’t know how any English learner could learn anything useful from it about how to improve their pronunciation.
Talkpal is taking a lot of money from users
Despite all these inaccuracies and AI fails, Talkpal is making a lot of money. According to the website Sensor Tower, which tracks app revenue, it makes $140,000 a month across its iOS and Android apps.
I have to admit, this makes me angry and sad. All the people who are paying for Talkpal think they’re getting reliable and useful language advice, but they’re not. It feels like a con — especially the pronunciation feedback.
If you’re a Talkpal subscriber, I’d love to hear from you in a comment to know how you feel about this. Were you aware it’s not that reliable or maybe you don’t mind because you’re just focusing on the features that you know are useful?
What should you use instead?
To be honest, I would recommend that you don’t fully rely on any app for AI feedback about your grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation.
I think you should use these “AI language tutors” mainly just for conversation practice, to get comfortable thinking quickly and expressing your thoughts. You can alsojust use ChatGPT for conversation.
If you want accurate, useful advice about your pronunciation, get that from a qualified teacher.
If you want to see your grammar corrected by AI, just focus on the corrections where you understand the mistake and you agree your version was wrong. If there’s a mistake you don’t understand, question whether it was really a mistake and ask a human to explain it to you.
