ELSA Speak
ELSA Speak is an AI English speaking coach that scores pronunciation, intonation, fluency, grammar and vocabulary in real time and builds a personalised practice path. It serves individual learners, corporate teams and K-12 schools, and ships a speech-assessment API.
What is ELSA Speak?
ELSA stands for English Language Speech Assistant, and the product does exactly what the acronym promises: it listens to you speak English and tells you, immediately, what to fix. Founded in 2016 by Vu Van, who left Vietnam for an MBA and a Master's in Education at Stanford, and by speech technologist Dr. Xavier Anguera, the company now claims more than 90 million learners, 92 million downloads and users in over 100 countries. The engine is a proprietary speech recogniser trained on native and non-native voice data, which is the point: general-purpose transcription models tend to penalise an accent, while ELSA is tuned to hear one and grade it fairly. Every spoken response is scored on five dimensions - pronunciation, intonation, fluency, grammar and vocabulary - with feedback granular enough to name the individual phoneme you missed, the pace you should hold, or the verb form you keep getting wrong. Progress is expressed as the ELSA Proficiency Score, mapped to CEFR bands and IELTS speaking scores, with indirect mapping to TOEIC, EIKEN and GEPT. ELSA reports 93.88% agreement between its scoring and expert human raters within one CEFR band. Around that engine sit three products. Individuals get an adaptive learning path, a bilingual tutor that lets beginners start a conversation in their own language, a choice of American, British or Australian accent, and AI role-play coaches for workplace talk, interviews, meetings, presentations and even dating. ELSA Business adds an admin dashboard, exportable CEFR-benchmarked reporting, 8,300+ lessons across 200+ topics, lessons built from the company's own documents, SSO and LMS or HRIS connection through the API, and a Meeting Companion that scores real work conversations. ELSA Schools targets K-12 institutions from 5 to 16, turning a teacher's existing material into speaking assignments and discarding the source audio the moment it has been scored. A separate ELSA API exposes the same assessment to third-party products, in scripted and unscripted modes.
What it does
- Score spoken English down to the phoneme, the word and the sentence
- Measure intonation, fluency, grammar and vocabulary in the same pass
- Run AI role-play conversations for the workplace, interviews, meetings and presentations
- Build a personalised learning path from level, goal, preferred accent and industry
- Estimate proficiency against CEFR, IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, PTE and OPIc benchmarks
- Analyse real workplace meetings and feed the gaps straight back into practice
- Generate lessons from a company's own documents or a teacher's own material
When to use ELSA Speak / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if ELSA Speak is the right fit.
When to use ELSA Speak
- Working professionals who need to sound clear and confident in meetings, client calls and presentations
- Job seekers rehearsing interviews that will be held in English
- Students, expats and travellers adapting to an English-speaking classroom or workplace
- HR and L&D teams rolling out measurable English coaching across a whole workforce
- K-12 teachers who want every pupil to practise speaking without adding to their own marking load
When not to use ELSA Speak
- Anyone learning a language other than English: ELSA teaches English and nothing else
- Learners after writing tuition, essay feedback or formal grammar lectures
- Universities looking at ELSA Schools: the site steers higher education towards ELSA Business instead
- Under-16s signing up on their own, since the privacy notice sets 16 as the minimum age outside a school account
- Buyers who need a published price before committing, as individual subscription rates are not shown on the site
How to use ELSA Speak
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Try the free browser assessment first: it runs without an account and returns a speaking score
- Download the iOS or Android app, or open the web version
- Create an account through the ELSA accounts portal
- Take the initial evaluation that fixes your starting level
- Declare your goal, your native language, the accent you want and your industry
- Work through the generated path lesson by lesson, speaking each item out loud
- Read the instant feedback at phoneme, word and sentence level, then repeat the item
- Move on to the AI role-plays - meetings, interviews, presentations - for unscripted speaking
- Track your ELSA Proficiency Score and CEFR band on the progress dashboard
- For an organisation: an admin creates the accounts, uploads in-house content and exports reports, with SSO or LMS connection through the API
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Deep specialisation: the speech engine is trained on non-native voices, where general ASR tends to penalise accents
- Feedback is granular down to the phoneme and immediately actionable
- A permanent free individual plan, plus a seven-day trial of the paid tiers
- A live demo that needs no account at all, straight in the browser
- Scores tied to recognised frameworks: CEFR, IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, PTE, OPIc
- Unusually complete published legal set: privacy notice, MSA, two DPAs, named DPO, Article 27 representative
- Nine years of track record and real scale: 90M+ learners and 1,300+ organisations claimed
Cons
- No individual pricing anywhere on the site: the figures load in JavaScript and are absent from the source
- One target language only - English - so it is useless for any other language goal
- No readable security certification: the trust centre does not render without JavaScript
- The stance on training models with learner data is never stated plainly, except for teacher-uploaded content
- No LinkedIn company page is exposed; the footer link is inert
- The efficacy figures come from internal studies, not from independent publication
- Consumer support runs through a third-party help centre with no public support email; business orders are non-refundable and non-cancellable
Pricing & Plans
ELSA Speak provides a permanent free individual plan together with a seven-day free trial of its paid tiers. The company does not publish the price of its individual subscriptions: the ELSA PRO and ELSA PREMIUM figures are loaded dynamically and appear nowhere in the site's source, including on the shop and payment FAQ pages. The only published subscription price is the business Team plan, at USD 342 per user per year for two to forty-nine users. Business, Enterprise and School plans are quoted on request, and the ELSA API is billed by usage from USD 0.008 per fifteen seconds of audio.
- free
- with a paid upgrade to ELSA PRO or ELSA PREMIUM whose price is not published
- 2 to 49 users
- USD 342 per user per year
- self-service sign-up
- 14-day free trial
- 50+ users
- custom pricing
- adds SSO
- LMS integration
- API
- custom content and dedicated onboarding
- 50+ learners
- custom pricing
- CEFR/IELTS/TOEIC mapping
- exportable ROI reporting
- optional branding and business API
- 21+ learners
- custom pricing
- curriculum-aligned lesson building
- class dashboard and parent-ready reports
- USD 0.008 (Scripted Standard)
- 0.01 (Scripted Premium)
- 0.02 (Unscripted Standard) and 0.025 (Unscripted Premium) per 15 seconds of audio
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how ELSA Speak handles your data.
GDPR overview
Implementation is concrete rather than declarative. ELSA has appointed a named Data Protection Officer, Matan Cohen, and designated an Article 27 representative inside the EEA, Elsa, Corp. - Sucursal Em Portuga in Lisbon, reachable at privacy@elsanow.io. Two data processing addenda are published in full, one for schools and one for enterprise, alongside a CCPA schedule, and transfers out of the EEA rely on the 2021/914 Standard Contractual Clauses with a UK addendum and Swiss FADP handling. Access, rectification, portability, erasure, restriction, objection and the right to complain to a supervisory authority are all spelled out. The ELSA Schools page claims compliance with COPPA and GDPR; no equivalent blanket claim is made for the consumer app. The stated minimum age is 16.
Who owns the data?
ELSA Corp. keeps everything on the product side. The Master Service Agreement states that ELSA and its affiliates retain full and exclusive ownership of all intellectual property rights; a subscription grants only a limited, non-transferable licence with no claim on the product, and any feedback a customer sends is irrevocably assigned to ELSA. On personal data the roles split. ELSA is the data controller for customers, prospects and partners, while for data processed on behalf of a company or a school the client is controller and ELSA is processor or sub-processor under the published DPA. Service providers covering hosting, CDN, payment, analytics and transcription may access data only as contracted.
Reuse rights
The licence is deliberately narrow: limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, valid only while fees are paid, and it carries no right to source code or to any use beyond the agreement. Customers may not resell it, sublicense it, strip proprietary notices or use the API in ways that infringe third-party rights. What they may reuse without asking is their own output: business administrators export progress, skill and custom performance reports, and teachers keep control of the material they upload, which serves only to generate assignments for their own class. Customers featured in ELSA communications can opt out in writing, and ELSA then removes the identifying details.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
ELSA and its authorised service providers store and process personal data in the United States, Europe, Japan, India, Vietnam and Singapore, as well as other locations required to deliver the service. Transfers out of the EEA, the UK and Switzerland are covered by the 2021/914 Standard Contractual Clauses, a UK addendum and FADP handling; the enterprise DPA also contemplates transfers to China, subject to the customer's authorisation. The contracting entity is a Delaware corporation based in Los Gatos, California, and the Master Service Agreement is governed by Californian law with venue in Santa Monica. On infrastructure the site is thin: the security disclosure page names Firebase, AWS and Cloudflare among third-party services outside its bug bounty scope, and the resolved IP address is a Cloudflare anycast node, so it locates nothing. No security certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 could be read: the trust centre does not render without JavaScript.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting ELSA Speak.
- Your voice is the raw material here, and the privacy notice files audio and video recordings under user-generated content
- ELSA states it has sold or shared network activity, geolocation and commercial data under US state privacy laws; opting out means emailing them
- The company never says plainly whether learner speech trains its models, while claiming its recogniser is fine-tuned on large-scale learner data
- No retention period is quantified for consumers: ELSA reserves the right to keep or delete data at any time, with or without notice
- Chasing a score is not the same as learning to communicate; an optimised ELSA Proficiency Score can flatter a speaker who still freezes with people
- In a company or a school, managers and teachers see individual progress, which turns practice into something close to monitoring
- Constant machine correction can erode tolerance for error, and with it the willingness to speak imperfectly to real humans
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Close to zero for an individual: run the browser test with no account at all, or install the iOS or Android app, sign up and answer a short placement evaluation. No configuration, no integration. For an organisation the effort is administrative rather than technical - an admin creates accounts, uploads in-house content and exports reports - with optional SSO and LMS or HRIS connection through the API, and a dedicated Account Manager included in the business plans. Only the ELSA API itself calls for developer work, with its own separate help centre.
Deployment
Apps stores
Supported languages
Behind ELSA Speak
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What is ELSA Speak?
Is there a free plan or a free trial?
How much does an individual subscription cost?
Which devices and platforms are supported?
Which languages does ELSA support?
Is there an API?
What is the minimum age?
Where is my data hosted?
Is my speech used to train ELSA's models?
Can ELSA connect to our LMS or HR system?
Should you pick ELSA Speak?
ELSA Speak is one of the rare AI tools that gains from being narrow. It does one thing - grade and improve spoken English - and it has been doing it since 2016, long enough to build a speech engine tuned to accented speech rather than tripped up by it. Feedback down to the phoneme, scores anchored to CEFR and IELTS, and role-play coaches for the situations that actually cost people opportunities: this is a coherent product, not a chatbot with a language skin. The legal groundwork is stronger than most consumer apps bother with. A named Data Protection Officer, an Article 27 representative in Lisbon, two published data processing addenda, Standard Contractual Clauses and a 16-year minimum age put ELSA ahead of the field on paper. The schools product goes further, discarding source audio the moment it has been scored. Two reservations temper that. The first is commercial: individual subscription prices are simply not published, loaded instead by script, so a prospective buyer cannot compare before signing up. The only visible figure is USD 342 per user per year on the business Team plan. The second is evidential. The efficacy numbers - 93.88% agreement with human raters, 95% feeling more confident - come from internal studies, and the company's position on training its models with learner speech is never stated in plain words, even though it describes fine-tuning on large-scale learner data elsewhere on the same site. For a professional, a job seeker or a student who wants structured speaking practice, the free plan and the no-account browser test make the decision cheap to test. For an organisation, ask about model training and read the DPA before the annual, non-refundable order goes in.
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