AI Language Learning Apps, Scored: Only One Shows You a Price

The best AI language learning app depends on what’s actually broken: Langua for conversation depth, Speak for a real beginner curriculum, ELSA Speak for English pronunciation, Talkpal for breadth across 130+ languages, and ChatGPT’s voice mode if you’re willing to write your own prompts. Only one of the seven prints a plain dollar price on its own site — Speak, at $17.99 a month or $83.99 a year — while ELSA prints none at all yet lists four different annual prices on its App Store page simultaneously (verified Aug 6, 2026).

Updated August 2026. Every price below was read off the vendor’s own site or its own App Store listing, and every missing price was confirmed missing on the date stamped beside it. Langua, Speak, Talkpal and Praktika were re-checked on August 5, 2026, and every store listing again on August 6; two claims were corrected as a result, and both corrections are in the changelog.

The seven at a glance

Scores are our judgment on documented evidence, not a lab benchmark. The table is sorted by score because it has to be sorted by something; score order is not buying order. Read the “Best for” column instead — a 7.5 that matches your gap beats an 8.4 that doesn’t.

Six of seven won’t show you a dollar price

We opened all seven pricing pages, then opened the four that matter most again six days later. Speak showed numbers both times: $83.99 for a year of Premium, $164.99 for Premium Plus. They’re not on speak.com/pricing, which returns a 404 — they’re inside the purchase flow, where you have to be halfway to checkout to see them.

Everyone else prices you rather than the product, and Langua lets you read the mechanism in its own page source. Fetch that page from a US address and the plan cards arrive with the price slots empty. Not wrong, not in the wrong currency: blank. Four empty elements where the numbers go, and no figure anywhere in the HTML except the $500-a-month line aimed at schools. A script then asks Paddle who you are, gets a currency code back, and writes the symbol and the amount into the blanks. Ours, exiting through Poland, filled in złoty. When that call fails, the page renders the string its developers left for the occasion: “Price not available.”

Talkpal does the same without the paper trail, and it moved between our visits: in July its three paid cards rendered as a bare ”/ month” with nothing in front, and on August 5 the numbers were there — PLN 44.99 monthly, down to PLN 14.06 if you commit to two years. A footnote says the quiet part: “Prices & currencies may vary depending on your location.”

The rest don’t get that far. ELSA Speak’s /en/pricing is a 404, and the page that replaced it is headed “ELSA Speak Pricing” without carrying one — it goes as far as a heading reading “Choose the Right Plan for Your English Learning Goals” and then lists no plans. Duolingo prices Max nowhere on its site; duolingo.com/max resolves to the homepage, and its help centre notes Max “cannot be purchased on web.” Praktika has no pricing page at all.

Go to the app stores, where these things are actually sold, and the picture doesn’t resolve — it shatters. Praktika’s Apple listing carries three different annual prices at once: $49.99, $119.99 and $139.99. ELSA’s carries four — $71.00, $99.99, $109.99 and $129.99 — plus three separate three-month prices and a $19.99 month (verified Aug 6, 2026). The company that won’t print a number on its own pricing page has four of them on Apple’s.

One caveat we’d rather state than bury: a store listing shows every SKU a developer has configured, including legacy and promotional entries a new customer may never be offered. That doesn’t rescue the picture. It means the same product has been priced a dozen ways and you don’t learn which one is yours until you’re at the till.

That’s the category in one line. When the price depends on your IP address, your currency and which upsell you tripped over, it isn’t a price. It’s a guess about what you’ll pay.

How we scored this (and what we didn’t do)

We didn’t reach B2 in seven languages this month, and any page implying otherwise is lying to you.

What we did: opened every vendor’s pricing page and recorded exactly what rendered, including the 404s, then went back on August 5 and did it again for the four that mattered most; read Duolingo’s help documentation on what Max includes and where it works; pulled both Apple listings for their in-app purchase tables; compared documented capabilities, language coverage and free-tier limits; and read the r/languagelearning thread Google’s own AI Overview cites for this query, comment by comment, twice. Vendor marketing claims below are labelled as vendor claims.

One caveat we’d rather state than bury: our browser exits through Poland, so Langua and Talkpal both answered in złoty. A US-routed fetch of Langua’s raw markup doesn’t rescue that, because the markup has no price in it to read. We have no US-rendered figure for either app, and we’ve said so beside every number rather than converting one and hoping you won’t check.

What documents can’t settle is the tie-breaker: whether the corrections these apps hand you are actually correct. That needs artifacts we haven’t captured yet.

Ratings are ours. No vendor saw a draft, and nobody on this page paid to be on it.

Best for breaking the intermediate plateau: Langua

Langua is the pick when your problem isn’t vocabulary, it’s that you freeze. It sells conversation and almost nothing else: roleplays, debates, chats built around your interests, a hands-free call mode, and voices the company says are cloned from real native speakers. Afterwards you get a written feedback report, grammar drills built from your own repeated mistakes, and any word you saved dropped into spaced-repetition flashcards. It covers 20+ languages, often in more than one dialect (LanguaTalk’s figure).

Standard caps you at 75 chat messages or 30 minutes of call time a day, which LanguaTalk says is about 45 minutes for an average learner; Unlimited removes both caps. Neither carries a price you can read before you show up. Both cards ship blank and let a script fill them in whatever currency it decides you belong to (verified Aug 5, 2026); ours came back as PLN 50.00 a month for Standard on the annual plan. The only number the page states outright is for schools and companies: “Pricing starts at $500/month.” The trial runs 5 days on monthly or 7 on annual, takes a card up front, and carries a 30-day money-back guarantee — but only if you subscribe on web or Android, because Apple won’t let LanguaTalk issue refunds.

Skip it if you’re an absolute beginner. There’s a guided A1/A2 course bolted on, but the whole product assumes you can already hold a wobbly conversation, and paying for conversation practice you can’t yet have is the most expensive mistake in this category.

Best for beginners who need a curriculum: Speak

Speak is the opposite bet. Instead of dropping you into free conversation, it runs a sequenced curriculum — short video lessons, then drills, then situational roleplay, with pronunciation feedback throughout. Premium Plus adds a personalised study plan, drilling on the mistakes you make most, and vocabulary chosen around your interests. Both tiers include the curriculum, roleplay, the tutor and pronunciation feedback.

It’s also the closest thing here to a company that behaves normally about money: $83.99 for a year of Premium, $164.99 for Premium Plus, unchanged across every check (verified Aug 6, 2026). Apple’s listing adds the monthly rates — $17.99 for Premium, $39.99 for Premium Plus — so paying annually costs a little over a third of twelve monthly payments on either tier.

Speak’s own site is less forthcoming than its store listing. Ask its FAQ how much Speak costs and the answer is that it depends: “Pricing varies by plan, region, and any current promotions, so the most accurate pricing is always within the app.” That is the most candid sentence any vendor on this page has written about its own pricing, and it’s still a refusal.

Skip it if your target language isn’t one Speak teaches well, or you’re already conversational. A curriculum is scaffolding, and once you can talk, scaffolding is what you’re paying to climb around.

Best for English pronunciation: ELSA Speak

ELSA does one job. It listens to you speak English, scores individual sounds rather than whole sentences, and tells you which phonemes are giving you away. You pick American, British or Australian as the target. For anyone whose grammar is fine and whose accent is costing them in interviews or meetings, that narrowness is the feature.

The pricing is the strangest here, and it’s the reason this page opens the way it does. elsaspeak.com/en/pricing returns a 404, /en/elsa-pro redirects to a page titled “ELSA Speak Pricing — Flexible Plans for Every Learner,” and that page contains no plan, no tier and no figure. It goes as far as a heading reading “Choose the Right Plan for Your English Learning Goals” and then simply doesn’t list any. What it does carry is a 7-day free trial and ELSA’s own claims of 92M+ downloads, 90M+ learners and a 4.9-star rating (ELSA’s numbers).

Apple has the figures ELSA won’t print, and there are too many of them. Four annual subscriptions sit live on the same listing — $71.00, $99.99, $109.99 and $129.99 — alongside three-month plans at $39.99, $47.99 and $58.00, and a $19.99 month (verified Aug 6, 2026). Nothing on the listing explains which is which. The gap between the cheapest and dearest year is $58.99, for the same app.

Skip it if you’re learning anything other than English, or your gap is fluency rather than sound. ELSA won’t teach you to hold a conversation. It’ll teach you to be understood in one.

Best for breadth, and the best free tier: Talkpal

Talkpal claims 130+ languages, roughly six times Langua’s range, which is the reason to look here if you’re learning something the specialists ignore. It runs chat and roleplay with a pronunciation assessment tool attached, and says 10,000,000+ people use it (Talkpal’s number, not an audited one).

The free tier is the honest headline. Basic gives you chat, personalised learning, progress tracking and the pronunciation tool, capped at 10 minutes a day, indefinitely (verified Aug 5, 2026) — more speaking practice than most learners actually do. Premium removes the cap and adds a 14-day trial. Its prices exist but aren’t yours until Talkpal decides where you are: our session was quoted PLN 44.99 a month, PLN 22.49 on the 12-month plan, PLN 14.06 on the 24-month, under a countdown clock and discount badges measured against the monthly rate.

Skip it if you need depth in a major language. On Spanish or French, Langua’s feedback and Speak’s curriculum both go further; Talkpal’s advantage is that it turns up at all in Thai, Croatian or Tagalog.

Best for building the habit: Duolingo Max

Duolingo’s AI tier isn’t the best AI here and doesn’t need to be. It’s welded to the one thing every other app on this page fails at: getting you to open it tomorrow. Max adds Roleplay and Video Call with Lily on top of Super Duolingo, running on the streaks, leagues and reminders that already have hundreds of millions of people trained.

Read the limits, which Duolingo publishes plainly even though it won’t publish a price. Max is iOS and Android only and “cannot be purchased on web.” Roleplay covers English speakers learning French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Italian plus five reverse pairs; Video Call covers six target languages on app version 13 or later. The price appears nowhere: duolingo.com/max lands on the homepage, and none of the ten in-app purchases Apple lists is named Duolingo Max — the visible entries are Super Duolingo at $9.99, $12.99, $83.99, $95.99 and $119.99 (verified Jul 30, 2026).

Skip it if you’re learning a language outside the supported set, or you’ve already done a year of Duolingo and can’t speak. That’s the oldest complaint in this category and Max is a patch on it, not a fix.

Best free option: ChatGPT’s voice mode

The uncomfortable answer for the six paid apps above is that a general chatbot does most of this for nothing. OpenAI’s own plan comparison shows Voice included on the Free tier; voice with video starts one tier up (verified Jul 30, 2026). Speak your target language into it, ask to be corrected in a specific style, ask it to slow down, ask it to stay in character as a pharmacist in Lisbon. It’ll do all of it.

Two Redditors in the thread below describe exactly this workflow, one talking to it daily and accepting that it makes mistakes “as long as I just use it for practice and not learning.” That’s the right posture. What’s missing is everything around the conversation: no curriculum, no progress tracking, no spaced repetition, no memory of the words you fumbled last Tuesday unless you build it yourself.

Skip it if you won’t do the work of prompting. The free tier wins on price and loses on structure, and structure is the entire product the paid apps are selling.

Cheapest annual, and the one to be careful with: Praktika

Praktika is genuinely ambitious. Full-motion AI avatars with backstories and regional accents, 1,000+ lessons including IELTS and TOEFL prep, and multimodal input — upload a photo of the street you’re on, or your CV, and practise around it. Its Apple listing shows 4.8 stars from 161K ratings, and the happy reviews are specific enough to be real: one says the free tier alone got them speaking French they could previously only read.

It’s also the only tool here we’d tell you to approach with your card details in mind. There’s no pricing page; praktika.ai/pricing redirects to a 404. The Apple listing shows three annual prices at once — “Premium 1 Year” at $119.99, a second “Premium 1 Year” at $139.99, and “Premium Annual” at $49.99 — and all three were still there when we rechecked six days later (verified Aug 5, 2026).

The billing complaints aren’t only on Reddit. A reviewer on Praktika’s own Apple listing, writing in November 2025, describes paying for a full year, being told no account existed for the email she paid with, then working four troubleshooting steps before support stopped replying: “I have since sent additional requests for support through the website, app, and email. NO RESPONSE.” On Reddit the complaint is the trial — “Sign up for the trial and get destroyed by massive charges when the trial ends” — and, five months later, “I can’t find a way to cancel my subscription.”

Read that with the guard we’d want you to use on us. The Reddit commenter volunteers in the same breath that he’s building a competing app, and the thread’s original post now reads ”[ Removed by moderator ]”, so only the replies survive. The Apple review is one customer’s account, not an audit. What nobody disputes is the part we checked ourselves: three prices, one product, no pricing page.

The better-sourced complaint is a 99-comment thread from May 2026, If you’re paying for Praktika, you need to see this, where a learner spent half an hour testing the app in two languages and found interface typos, a word of the day of ordinance, definitions returned for the wrong sense of a word mid-conversation, and tutor voices whose accents didn’t match their labels. Another user: “It would switch its accent from my TL to spanish or french ALL the time.”

What makes that thread worth your time is the reply. Praktika’s chief product officer turned up under his own name and conceded most of it point by point — typos fixed in the following release, the mislabelled “British” tutor “a mistake, and it was fixed last week”, the word-of-the-day feature “being completely overhauled” — while defending the accent leakage as a limit of current text-to-speech. Plenty of learners in the same thread push back on the criticism as nitpicking, and one makes the case for the product better than Praktika’s marketing does: “nothing else lets me just talk out loud for 20 min without feeling judged.”

That’s a company that answers. It isn’t yet a company that tells you what a year costs.

Skip it if you’d struggle to absorb a surprise $139.99. The product may well be worth $50 a year. Nothing published tells you that’s what you’ll be charged.

What r/languagelearning actually says

Google’s AI Overview for this query cites one Reddit thread, so we read it: What is the best AI for language learning?, posted July 2025. It has 35 comments and sits at zero points, re-read twice on August 5, 2026. The upvote ratio came back 47% on one pass and 45% on the next, which is Reddit fuzzing rather than anybody voting. Either way the subreddit downvoted the question itself.

One commenter explains why, then answers anyway: “Do we have to see this question every day? Its getting tedious, not least because if anyone genuinely tries to answer it, we’re voted down by all the people who prefer not to use any AI, ever, at all.” Then: “Anyway FWIW: I use Langua. Its very good.” Reddit’s own best-sorted ranking puts a one-word reply second from the top of the thread. The word is “None.”

The named picks are thin and scattered — Langua once, Talkpal once alongside Memrise and LingQ’s Lynx AI, ChatGPT repeatedly, plus lingolooper and Language Reactor. No paid app on our list is the thread’s top answer. That slot belongs to someone who feeds ChatGPT the vocabulary they keep forgetting and runs the resulting song lyrics through Suno until the verbs come back as Eurodance. The most useful reply refuses to pick at all: “There isn’t a single ‘best’ AI for language learning… The sweet spot is using them together: chat for fluency, voice for speaking, and flashcards for memory.”

Read it with your guard up, because Google didn’t. The snippet Google surfaces promotes “French Together,” from a comment opening “We built a specialized French language learning AI” — a founder pitching his own product, at one point, with an unanswered reply asking what the tool is even called. Another commenter recommends a URL that is plainly spam. The real consensus is narrower and less flattering to everyone selling something: two people report hallucinated corrections, one notes AI wins not by beating a tutor but by beating no practice at all, and one gets at why these apps sell — “Some people (me included) are embarrassed to try speaking with a human… if you’re talking to a bot, there’s no embarrassment.”

Why AI language learning apps are priced like this

Every category we cover has some price-hiding. Here the mechanism is specific: these are consumer app-store subscriptions, sold on impulse, at prices set per country and per promotion. A learner in Warsaw and a learner in Seattle are shown different numbers on purpose, and the app store makes that trivial to do. Publishing one figure on the website breaks the whole apparatus.

So treat the website as marketing and the checkout as the price. Three practical moves. Subscribe on the web rather than in the app where you can — Langua’s 30-day money-back guarantee only exists on web subscriptions, because Apple controls refunds otherwise. Screenshot the price you were shown before you tap, since the same product can be quoted at $49.99 or $139.99 a year. And run the free tiers first: Talkpal gives you 10 minutes a day forever, ChatGPT gives you voice on the free plan, and between them you’ll know within a fortnight whether you’re the kind of person who’ll actually talk to a machine.

What the SERP for this looks like right now

Worth saying plainly, because it shapes how much to trust anything you read here, us included. Google’s AI Overview for “best ai language learning app” crowns Langua on the strength of two pages: an affiliate-funded indie blog whose #1 pick is Langua, and LanguaTalk’s own blog post, which also ranks Langua #1 and scores its competitors. A third cited page belongs to a rival app that ranks itself first. The indie blog is a real one, written by a Swedish polyglot who discloses his affiliate deals openly, and he’s probably right about Langua. He’s still paid when you click.

That’s the gap this page exists to fill, and the reason every price above carries a date and every tool a reason to skip it.

FAQ

What is an AI language learning app?

An AI language learning app uses speech recognition and large language models to hold spoken conversations in your target language, correct what you say, and adapt to your level. It differs from a traditional app like classic Duolingo by generating unscripted dialogue rather than marking multiple-choice answers.

Which AI language learning app is best in 2026?

It depends on your gap. Langua for conversation depth at intermediate level, Speak for beginners who need a sequenced curriculum, ELSA Speak for English pronunciation specifically, Talkpal for languages the specialists don’t cover, and Duolingo Max if your real problem is showing up daily.

Is there a genuinely free AI language learning app?

Two. Talkpal’s Basic plan gives you chat, pronunciation assessment and progress tracking with a 10-minute daily cap, indefinitely (verified Aug 5, 2026). ChatGPT’s Free plan includes voice mode, so you can hold unscripted conversations at no cost if you’re willing to write your own prompts (verified Jul 30, 2026).

How much does an AI language learning app cost?

Roughly $50 to $165 a year, but no app here holds one price. Speak is the only one printing plain dollars on its own flow: $17.99/month or $83.99/year, $39.99 or $164.99 for Premium Plus (verified Aug 6, 2026). On Apple, ELSA lists four annual prices at once ($71.00 to $129.99) and Praktika three ($49.99, $119.99, $139.99). Langua and Talkpal quote in your local currency; Duolingo publishes no Max price at all.

Can AI actually teach you to speak a language?

It can give you unlimited low-stakes speaking practice, which is the bottleneck for most learners. It can’t be trusted as the authority on what’s correct — two commenters in the r/languagelearning thread cited above report hallucinated corrections, and the honest framing from that thread is practice, not instruction.

Is Duolingo’s AI worth paying for?

Only if Duolingo already works for you. Max adds Roleplay and Video Call with Lily to Super Duolingo, but it’s mobile-only, covers a limited set of course pairs, and publishes no price. If you’ve done a year of Duolingo and still can’t hold a conversation, a conversation-first app is the better spend.

Changelog

• 2026-08-06 — Store-listing verification pass; one claim withdrawn, one finding added, sourcing upgraded. Speak does publish a monthly price. Previous versions said no monthly figure existed and framed the choice as “a year or nothing”. Apple’s US listing shows Monthly Premium at $17.99 and Monthly Premium Plus at $39.99 beside the annual $83.99 and $164.99; the claim is withdrawn from the answer block, the table, the Speak section and the FAQ. Speak’s own FAQ answer on pricing — “the most accurate pricing is always within the app” — added in its place. ELSA Speak’s Apple listing carries four simultaneous annual prices ($71.00, $99.99, $109.99, $129.99), three three-month prices and a $19.99 month, which out-fragments Praktika’s three and is now the page’s lead pricing example; earlier versions said ELSA publishes “nothing at all”, true of its own site but not of its store listing, and the page now separates the two. An explicit caveat was added that store listings show every configured SKU, including legacy and promotional ones. Praktika sourcing upgraded to a live 99-comment r/languagelearning thread from May 2026 in which Praktika’s CPO replies under his own name and concedes typos, a mislabelled tutor accent and a word-of-the-day overhaul, plus a defender’s line on why the product works; the older thread, whose original post reads ”[ Removed by moderator ]”, is kept only as corroboration. SERP re-pulled: the AI Overview still crowns Langua, and of six organic results three are Reddit or app stores while the rest are apps ranking themselves, including Langua’s own site at #3 and copycatcafe.com at #5 opening its list with Copycat Cafe. No score changed.
• 2026-08-05 — Independent QA verification pass; one claim withdrawn. The euro figures are gone. An earlier version of this page reported that Langua’s markup shipped EUR defaults (EUR 12.50 Standard, EUR 16.67 Unlimited) before the currency swap. Re-fetched at QA, it doesn’t: all four price elements come back empty, and there is no figure of any currency in the served HTML except the institutional $500/month line. The finding is worse for Langua than the one it replaces, and it’s now described from the page’s own script, including the fallback string “Price not available”. Also re-fetched at QA and unchanged: Speak’s $83.99 and $164.99 with the Premium vs Premium Plus feature rows; speak.com/pricing still a hard 404; Praktika’s ten Apple in-app purchases including all three conflicting annual prices, the 4.8/161K header and the November 2025 support complaint quoted verbatim; Talkpal’s PLN 44.99 / 22.49 / 14.06 cards, the free 10-minute cap and the location footnote. ELSA re-checked and its stamp moved to August 5 — /en/pricing/ still 404s and the replacement page now visibly asks you to “Choose the Right Plan” without listing one. The r/languagelearning thread was re-read comment by comment and every quote held; its upvote ratio read 45% rather than 47%, so the page now reports both and names the fuzzing.
• 2026-08-05 — Verification pass; three material corrections. Talkpal changed: in July its paid cards rendered with no number at all, and on this pass they carried figures (in local currency, PLN 44.99 down to PLN 14.06 a month on the 24-month plan). The page now describes what is there rather than what was. Langua’s pricing mechanism identified: a US-routed fetch of the raw markup shows the plan cards ship with their price slots empty and a script fills them per visitor, so the July PLN figures were our session’s fill, not Langua’s price. Keyword cluster re-pulled via keyword_overview (it had been 403-ing in July, forcing reliance on keyword_suggestions): difficulty was substantially understated, primary “ai language learning app” SD 18 → 37, “ai for language learning” 22 → 55. The claim that nothing in the cluster exceeded SD 30 was withdrawn; the primary and lead secondary remain live targets. Also: Speak’s $83.99/$164.99 re-confirmed unchanged; Praktika’s three simultaneous annual prices re-confirmed still live six days on, and a first-party billing complaint from its own Apple listing added, which matters because the Reddit thread’s original post has been removed by moderators; r/languagelearning thread re-read in full and every quote re-verified verbatim (still 35 comments, still 0 points); the thread’s top-voted answer added, and a mis-stated vote ranking on the “None” reply corrected to best-sort order. Body word count re-measured and the frontmatter figure corrected from 2,148 to 3,155, with the measurement method now stated; prose trimmed by roughly 300 words in the process. No score changed.
• 2026-07-30 — Page created. Keyword targets set from scratch (category is not in the manifest): primary “ai language learning app”, 1,600/mo, SD 18, $4.20 CPC; whole cluster came back under SD 30, so this ships as a live target rather than a plant. Pricing checked live on every vendor’s own site or Apple listing: Speak ($83.99/$164.99 per year) is the only published figure; confirmed-absent or unrenderable pricing for Langua, ELSA Speak, Talkpal, Duolingo Max, Praktika and ChatGPT. Langua figures came back in PLN because the session geolocated to Poland — flagged for a US re-pull. Praktika’s three simultaneous annual prices recorded. SERP state recorded for both head terms: the AI Overview fires and cites four sources, of which one is an affiliate-funded indie blog, one is a vendor blog ranking its own product first, and one is a rival app ranking itself first. r/languagelearning source threads read in full and quotes verified live, including the founder self-promotion Google’s snippet had promoted.

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Independent, no paid placements. We verify every price on the vendor’s own site and stamp the date; we publish who should skip each tool; we keep this changelog public. See how we score AI tools and our independence charter. More categories on the AI tools index, every verified price on the pricing index, every verdict in the reviews index. Related: AI note takers, the other category where speech recognition does the real work.