All the scores come as percentages and indicate how close you are to sounding like a native speaker. By clicking on the question mark next to each “skill,” you can see additional information about it, along with examples.

The IELTS Speaking Score Predictor is interesting but should be taken with a grain of salt. In the IELTS exam, you will be scored not just on pronunciation but also on your grammar, word choice, topic development, and fluency in conversation.

One of the most interesting parts of ELSA is the detailed report. It gives you a sentence-by-sentence analysis of how close you came to sounding like a native American speaker, what you said well (in green), and what you should work on (in yellow and red).

By tapping the play icon, you can listen to your recording again, and by tapping the speaking icon, you can listen to the original recording by the native speaker.

Pretty cool, right?

You can also access a more detailed ELSA Score under your profile. It grades your pronunciation, fluency, intonation, word stress, and listening, although again, these are not evenly weighted.

Your ELSA Score will update as you do more activities. As such, you might find you have a different ELSA Score, Assessment, and IELTS Speaking Score Predictor.

The thoroughness of the feedback, as well as the speed at which it’s available, left me impressed.

Typically, you practice pronunciation by working with a native speaker or a skilled and trained teacher. In their absence, you can do drills by yourself, as well as recording yourself speaking and then listening back to pinpoint mistakes.

ELSA takes inspiration from these methods but improves on them in two ways. One, it gives instant feedback, meaning there’s no need to wait for your next class to receive corrections. Two, it provides a standard model against which your speech is analyzed and the differences are automatically calculated. In doing so, it removes the guessing game from listening to your own recordings.

After you’ve done your test, ELSA will reorganize the learning material so that greater priority is given to your weakest skills.

Use the code “ALRELSA” to get 10% off your subscription. The coupon is only valid if purchased from the link below and not from within the app. 

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WORD BANK

The Word Bank contains all the words and phrases you’ve worked on so far. It separates the ones you got a high score on from those you need to work on, i.e. you scored 80 or below on them. You can manually add any word you’re struggling with to the “saved” section of the Word Bank.

DICTIONARY (EXCLUSIVE TO THE PREMIUM VERSION)

For paying subscribers, the Dictionary allows you to look up any word, phrase, or sentence and listen to an audio recording of it. You’ll also see the IPA spelling and – which I think is the coolest thing ever – a video of people saying those words or phrases in a real-life conversation.

HOW DO LESSONS WORK?

The in-app learning is divided into three sections: Skills, Topics, and Daily Coach.

1) SKILLS

When you go to the Skills section, you’ll see 21 planets. They’re all a different color and represent specific pronunciation skills.

You’ll already recognize some of the skills from the Assessment categories, but the entire list is:

• Welcome
• /h/, /f/, /v/ – Topic: Everyday English (24 lessons)
• Consonant clusters (groups of consonants that aren’t separated by vowels, e.g. “thr” in “through”) – Topics: Business (30 lessons) and Education (12 lessons)
• /æ/, /ʌ/, /a/ – Topic: All About Music (24 lessons)
• /s/, /ʃ/, /z/ – Topics: Travel with Michelle (61 lessons) and Customer Service (12 lessons)
• Schwa (/ə/ – Topic: Jobs, Education Background, Hometown, and Hobbies (37 lessons)
• /p/ /t/ /k/ – Topic: Food and Drinks (36 lessons)
• /eɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/ – Topic: Everyday English (30 lessons)
• Ending sounds – Topics: Business (12 lessons) and Family (37 lessons)
• /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/, /dʒ/ – Topic: Banking (10 lessons)
• Nasals: /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ – Topic: Everyday English (24 lessons)
• /i/, /ɪ/ – Topic: Entertainment (36 lessons)
• /j/, /y/, /ʒ/, /dʒ/ – Topic: Everyday English (18 lessons)
• Th sounds – Topics: Environment (14 lessons) and Wellbeing (17 lessons)
• /w/, /v/, /b/ – Topic: Relationships (28 lessons)
• Diphthongs – Topic: Everyday English (18 lessons)
• /l/, /r/ – Topics: Relationships (26 lessons) and Beauty (31 lessons)
• R sounds – Topic: Education (52 lessons)
• /u/, /ʊ/ – Topic: Everyday English (18 lessons)
• Intonation – Topic: Misc. (49 lessons)
• Mixed Skills

You’ll also see your current score for this skill in a color-coded circle: green is good, amber needs improvement.

Each skill is further broken down into topics (more on that to come) and a series of lessons on pronunciation, listening, syllable stress, and dialogue.

The lessons consist of just five words, phrases, or syllables, so calling them micro-lessons doesn’t seem unfair.

They’re also gamified. You can track your progress by looking at the bar at the top of the screen. Every time you master a word or phoneme, a section of it turns green. When the entire bar is green, you’ve mastered all five words and the lesson ends.

If you quit mid-lesson, you’ll lose your progress. Given how short each micro-lesson is, however, it’s not too demotivating.

Let’s take a deeper look at the Diphthongs skill.

Clicking on the “?” icon on the left gives you information on what diphthongs are, along with common pronunciation mistakes and examples.

It’s a shame the team behind ELSA didn’t include a drawing or animation. It would be good to see how we can create diphthongs rather than reading a block of text.

Use the code “ALRELSA” to get 10% off your subscription. The coupon is only valid if purchased from the link below and not from within the app. 

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Listening is the first lesson for this skill. You have to choose the word you hear from two similar options. If you get it correct, you then see the phonetic spelling of both words.

To pass the lesson, you need to score 80% or higher. The quick lesson time and automated applause are a nice motivation to take on just one more lesson.

For lessons that involve speaking, I found I had better results when I spoke slowly and took care to enunciate every phoneme.

You also have the option of listening to the native speaker’s audio at normal and slow speeds.

For single-word pronunciation lessons, make sure you’ve toggled the “Lookup” option. This lets you check the IPA spelling, definition, and an example sentence by swiping to the left on the bottom third of your screen.

Want a bigger challenge? Try toggling between the “regular” and “advanced” options at the top of your screen and you’ll get different scores. The regular mode only tests you on the phoneme the module is focused on, while the advanced mode will give you an overall score based on all the sounds in the word or phrase. Don’t forget that you can redo your recordings until you’re happy with how they sound.

The syllable stress lessons are a little different. You’ll see a word with a syllable highlighted in green: this is the one you should emphasize when speaking. However, once you figure out that this is all you have to do to pass the test, laziness can kick in.

For example, in the word educational, the syllable “ca” should be stressed. Since the other four syllables are unstressed, the app won’t evaluate how you say them. I passed the majority of this lesson by saying “blah” for all the unstressed syllables, meaning I turned “educational” into “blahCAblahblah.”

Is it a big deal if this exercise is testing stress placement only? That’s up to you to decide. But from my perspective, testing the correct pronunciation as well as the syllable stress would be more useful.

Perhaps the most interesting lesson type is the dialogue one. Just like in a brick-and-mortar school, you do a role-play exercise that involves reading a dialogue line by line.

The app kicks the dialogue off, and when it’s your turn, you’re asked to record yourself. You then get instant feedback with a percentage figure and your mistakes marked in red.

Tap the red letters to get tips on how to improve. You can also listen to the individual phonemes along with your recording.

After finishing each skill, you get an overall score and a badge appears next to the planet’s icon.

Use the code “ALRELSA” to get 10% off your subscription. The coupon is only valid if purchased from the link below and not from within the app. 

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2) TOPICS

There are far more topics for you to work through than the ones listed under Skills. Each one tests you on specific pronunciation skills and presents you with topic-specific vocabulary.

There are currently over 50 topics, some of which are in beta mode:

1. The new normal
2. Tips from an accent coach
3. Cricket
4. National High School Exam
5. Talk with Do Nhat Nam
6. Vietnamese Culture
7. Everyday English
8. High School
9. Middle School
10. Elementary: Letters A to D
11. Elementary: Letters E to H
12. Elementary: Letters I to M
13. Elementary: Letters N to Q
14. Elementary: Letters R to U
15. Elementary: Letters V to Z
16. Intonation (beta)
17. Lee Working as a Salesman
18. Pick your Answer: Interview (beta)
19. Working at a hotel
20. Working at a restaurant
21. Working in healthcare
22. Working for an airline
23. Working in customer service
24. Relationship
25. Real-Life Stories
26. Holiday Words
27. One Lesson per Day
28. All about Music
29. Travel with Michelle
30. Daily Conversations
31. Talk to your colleagues
32. Movies
33. Move your mouth – watch video
34. Culture
35. Beat the IELTS test
36. In a medical center
37. Common mispronunciations
38. Videos for Vietnamese
39. Number, Date & Time
40. Welcome
41. Taxi Driver
42. Customer Service
43. Introduction
44. Family
45. Food and Drinks
46. Entertainment
47. Education
48. Beauty
49. Wellbeing
50. Business
51. Environment
52. Banking
53. Job Interview
54. Triangle English
55. Daily Lessons
56. Startup
57. Videos conversation Set 1

According to ELSA, there are 1,400+ lessons and new ones will continue to be added. Interested in a different topic? Android users can also make their own lists or use someone else’s.

3) DAILY COACH

You’ll get a daily reminder to use ELSA, but how long you practice for is up to you. Go to the settings to set your daily learning goal to anything from 5 minutes upwards. According to ELSA’s website, 10 minutes of daily practice is optimal for “instant improvement.”

Once you’ve finished your session, your daily performance will be scored, and you’ll get a reminder to practice again tomorrow.

Your overall progress will be calculated cumulatively with the data from these daily performance tests. This percentage is further broken down into individual and cluster sounds, each of which has its own score.

PRICING

While you can use ELSA for free, you only get access to a stripped-down version of the platform. The Dictionary and most of the lessons will be off-limits.

To access all the content, you need to pay for an ELSA PRO subscription. Committing to a longer plan will get you a discount:

1. ELSA PRO: 1-month membership for $5.99
2. ELSA PRO: 3-month membership for $13.99
3. ELSA PRO: 1-year membership for $44.99

Use the code “ALRELSA” to get 10% off your subscription. The coupon is only valid if purchased from the link and not from within the app. 

ALTERNATIVES

If you’re not convinced by ELSA, the most obvious alternative is a tutor who can work with you on your pronunciation. Bear in mind that this could be costly, plus scheduling lessons isn’t always convenient.

You can find online tutors through italki, which offers affordable rates and a wide pool of teachers to choose from. Find out more about it in our detailed review.

Speechling is another good option if pronunciation is your main goal. You can record yourself speaking and receive feedback from a coach within 24 hours. Here’s what we thought of it.

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you want to polish your accent and sound more like a native American English speaker, is ELSA worth buying?

Yes.

Not only does it have an expansive and engaging list of topics, but it will give you detailed training on specific English phonemes, tell you exactly what you’re doing wrong, and track your improvements. (And you’ll probably learn new vocabulary while you’re at it, too.)

Pronunciation is one of the most challenging parts of learning a new language. Yet seeing how my accent improved with ELSA gave me more confidence speaking to other people in English.

Use the code “ALRELSA” to get 10% off your subscription. The coupon is only valid if purchased from the link below and not from within the app. 

Visit Elsa Speak