Practice English: How to Compare AI-Based Apps

Every month a new AI app promises to make you fluent in English. Some of them are genuinely good. Most are polished enough to feel useful while you're inside them and disappointing once you step back and ask whether your English has actually improved. The problem is not the apps themselves — the problem is that most people download them without a clear idea of what they are actually testing.

I've spent time with a lot of these tools, and I teach the learners who arrive at our free track after months of using them. The pattern is consistent enough that I now give every new learner the same briefing: here are the six things to check before you commit to any AI English-practice app, and here is what a red flag looks like in each one.

Why comparing AI apps is harder than it looks

When you watch a demo of an AI conversation app, it almost always looks impressive. The responses are fluent, the interface is clean, and the scenario feels realistic. That is the easiest version of the product to show you — an extended AI monologue responding to well-formed input. What the demo rarely shows you is what happens when you say something grammatically strange, when you repeat the same error three times in a row, or when you ask the app to explain why what you said was wrong and what a natural alternative would be. Those are the moments that separate a genuine practice tool from an expensive chat interface.

So before you download, stop watching the demo and start asking the demo to fail. Ask it a real question from your level. Make a deliberate mistake. See what happens. The framework below gives you six specific things to probe.

The best test of an AI practice app is not the conversation it generates — it is the correction it gives when you say something wrong.

The six dimensions that matter

1. Conversation and roleplay quality. Is the conversation genuinely open-ended — will it follow wherever your answer leads — or does it steer you back towards a script within two or three turns? Open-ended conversation forces you to produce language rather than select it. Good apps let a roleplay go off-track and deal with it naturally; weaker ones recover to a fixed dialogue tree within moments.

2. Correction depth. This is the most important dimension and the one where the gap between good and mediocre is widest. Shallow correction is: "Good try! You almost had it." Genuine correction is: "You said 'I am agree with you' — the correct form is 'I agree with you' because 'agree' is a verb, not an adjective, so it doesn't combine with 'be' in this way." If an app cannot name the error and show you a correct alternative, it is not correcting your English; it is making you feel corrected, which is different.

3. Structure and progression. Does the app have a curriculum — a sequence that builds from what you know now to what you need next — or does it give you the same kind of exercise at every session regardless of what you learned last time? Apps with genuine progression move you through levels, track which errors recur, and surface material you need to revisit. Apps without it give you the pleasant feeling of practice without the compound effect of learning.

4. Speaking versus typing. Some apps are designed for speaking; others accept text and call it a conversation. These are not the same thing. Speaking demands that you produce language in real time, under mild cognitive load, without the ability to delete and retype. If your goal is to speak English in the real world — in meetings, on calls, in face-to-face situations — you need an app that forces you to produce audio, not one that accepts text and silently reads it as speech.

5. Price and access depth. The question is not "is it free?" but "what does the free version actually let me do?" An app that demos its correction feature but puts it behind a paywall at the point you actually need it has misled you. Check what the full useful version costs per month, and compare that cost against what you get.

6. Offline reference. Can you look something up — a grammar rule, a word, a phrase — when you're not connected and not in a session? The best practice apps treat offline reference as a first-class feature because the moments when you most need to understand a rule are often not inside a scheduled session.

Comparison framework at a glance

Use this table as a checklist when you're evaluating any AI practice English app. The "red flag" column describes what a weak product looks like on each dimension.

Speaking vs typing: why it matters which one you train

This distinction is worth pausing on because apps tend to blur it deliberately. Typing a sentence into a chat interface feels like having a conversation. In terms of what your brain is doing, it is not. When you type, you can pause, delete, retype, and check yourself before the app sees what you produced. When you speak, the words go out in real time, under real cognitive pressure, in the order your brain produces them. Those are two very different skills, and improving at one does not automatically improve the other.

If the real-world situation you are preparing for involves speaking — presenting at work, interviewing in English, having a phone call, travelling — then you need to practise speaking. An app that accepts typed responses is useful for grammar and reading, but it is not preparing the specific skill you will actually need. Look for a voice mode that records your audio and responds to it, not one that converts your speech to text and then treats it as a typed message.

For more on how AI can be genuinely useful for building spoken English, our piece on practising real-life English conversations with AI goes into the mechanics of what good voice-based practice looks like.

The missing piece in most AI apps

Running this framework across the category of AI English-practice apps, one gap stands out: genuine correction. Most apps handle conversation quality reasonably well — the underlying language models are good enough that the conversations feel natural. Structure and progression vary, with some apps doing this well and many treating every session as an isolated event. Offline reference is consistently weak.

But the most consistent gap is correction depth. It is the hardest feature to build well because accurate correction requires the app to understand your intended meaning, identify the specific linguistic rule being violated, and explain it in language your level can understand — all in real time. That is a harder task than generating a fluent response. Many apps pass the first part (they respond fluently) while quietly failing the second and third (they don't tell you what was wrong and why).

The reason this matters so much is that practice without correction is not neutral — it can actively reinforce errors. If you say "I am agree" thirty times and the app responds naturally without flagging it, you have practised being wrong thirty times. The spacing effect works on errors as well as on correct forms. Sources: British Council — English learning resources; Council of Europe — CEFR framework.

For a deeper look at why correction timing matters as much as correction itself, our piece on feedback timing in English practice covers the research in practical terms. And for a broader look at how AI apps compare across all four language skills, the post on effective language learning apps is worth reading alongside this one.

How to choose for your level and goal

The framework above gives you what to look for. Here is how to apply it at different levels and goals:

If you are at A2 or B1 and building your foundation, prioritise structure and correction depth over conversation openness. At this stage you have enough errors that an app which catches none of them will slow you down. An app with a genuine curriculum — even a simple one — will move you faster than an open-ended AI conversation partner that lets everything pass.

If you are at B1 or B2 and trying to move into confident speaking, conversation quality and speaking-mode support become more important. Your grammar is solid enough that an unstructured conversation gives you real practice. But still test the correction — errors at B1 and B2 are subtler (prepositions, article use, collocation), and an app that misses them will let you plateau.

If you are preparing for a specific goal — an exam, a job interview, a presentation — check whether the app has scenarios relevant to that goal. Generic conversation practice and exam-specific preparation are different products. Many apps offer one and describe themselves as the other.

Whatever level you are at, the combination that works best is an AI app that gives you volume and immediate feedback alongside a structured track that gives you progression and genuine correction. Neither replaces the other. The apps handle the volume; the structured track makes sure that volume is building the right thing.

Our free B1 track was built to be that structured layer — the part that catches what the apps miss and ensures the practice you're doing is compounding rather than just accumulating.

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