ELSA Speak
AI coach that scores English pronunciation sound by sound
Overview
ELSA Speak is an AI English-speaking app that scores pronunciation at the level of individual sounds and adds AI role-plays, a Speech Analyzer and IELTS, TOEFL and TOEIC preparation. It was started in 2016 by Vietnamese-born Vu Van and speech technologist Xavier Anguera, and ELSA Corp. has offices in San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh City. Individual plans run $89.99 to $99.99 a year, with team, enterprise and school plans.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 14 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- 10,000+ lessons across 22 pronunciation skills
- Advanced feedback
- Progress tracking
- Everything in Pro
- Unlimited role-plays on ELSA AI
- All certificate courses (IELTS, US Citizenship, Oxford, HarperCollins)
- Speech Analyzer on the web
- AI-powered speaking practice
- Instant personalised feedback
- Progress tracking and reporting
- Everything in Team
- Practice built from company materials and terminology
- SSO, LMS integration and APIs
- Personalised feedback for every student
- Teacher-built curriculum-aligned lessons
- Class dashboard and progress reports
Use cases
What you can produce with ELSA Speak
- A pronunciation score for every spoken attempt, broken down sound by sound
- A personalised learning path built from the sounds and skills you miss most
- AI role-play practice for meetings, interviews and presentations (Premium)
- Feedback on free-form speech through the Speech Analyzer (Premium)
- IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC and US citizenship test preparation courses (Premium)
- Team dashboards and progress reports for companies and schools
- Pronunciation scoring embedded in other products through the ELSA API
ASEAN Perspective
ELSA Speak in Southeast Asia
ELSA Speak was co-built by a Vietnamese founder who experienced firsthand the accent barriers faced by ASEAN professionals in global workplaces, and Vietnam and Indonesia together account for roughly half of its documented customer geography. The app's AI is explicitly trained on Asian-accented English patterns, making its error detection far more relevant to SEA learners than tools built on predominantly native-speaker corpora. B2B partnerships with Vietnamese schools and corporates (including Intel and Kimberly-Clark Vietnam) and a 2026 Hong Kong market launch underline its sustained APAC expansion trajectory. For ASEAN professionals targeting IELTS, TOEFL, or multinational career advancement, ELSA Speak remains the most purpose-fit pronunciation tool available at this price.
ELSA Speak is one of the most focused pronunciation tools available: sound-by-sound scoring, a learning path built from your weak spots, and a choice of American, British or Australian targets. It suits ASEAN learners whose vocabulary is fine but whose accent gets in the way at work or in exams.
Read the plan split before paying. The $89.99 Pro plan is pronunciation-only; unlimited AI role-plays, the certificate courses and the web Speech Analyzer need the $99.99 Premium plan. Both renew yearly after a seven-day trial.
What we found
ELSA Speak, short for English Language Speech Assistant, is a pronunciation and speaking coach started in 2016 by Vu Van and the speech technologist Xavier Anguera. Vu Van left Vietnam to study at Stanford and built the app around the accent problem many second-language speakers have: knowing the words but not being understood. The company, ELSA Corp., lists offices in San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh City among others, and its September 2023 Series C of $23 million, led by UOB Venture Management, took total funding to $60 million.
The app listens to each attempt and scores it sound by sound, with feedback on stress, intonation and fluency, then builds a learning path from the weak spots. It now goes beyond drills: AI role-plays for meetings, interviews and presentations, a Speech Analyzer for free-form speech, and preparation courses for IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC and the US citizenship test. Learners can practise toward American, British or Australian English, which contradicts an earlier version of this page that said only American English was supported.
The plan split matters more than the prices suggest. On ELSA's US catalogue, read 14 October 2026, Pro is $89.99 a year and labelled pronunciation coaching only, with 10,000+ lessons, advanced feedback and progress tracking. Premium is $99.99 a year and is the only plan with unlimited AI role-plays, all certificate courses and the web Speech Analyzer. Both start with a seven-day trial, and the App Store also sells a $19.99 monthly option. Companies pay $342 per user a year for teams of 2-49, with enterprise and school plans on quote.
Download counts are vendor-reported and move between pages: 92 million on the homepage, 90 million learners on the about page. The US App Store listing showed 4.8 from about 114,000 ratings, read 14 October 2026. For Southeast Asian learners preparing for exams or client-facing work, Premium is the plan that delivers the conversation practice.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Notable facts
- U2 guitarist The Edge (David Evans) participated in ELSA's Series B funding round in 2021
- ELSA's AI is trained on accented English data from over 20 million non-native speakers — making it one of the largest non-native accent corpora in existence
- Early in ELSA's history, 80–90% of its users came from Vietnam; that share has since dropped to around 20% as the app went global
- ELSA CEO Vu Van attended the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2025 as part of the 2024 Technology Pioneer cohort
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including ELSA Speak's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with ELSA Speak unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
For the latest details, please refer to ELSA Speak directly →
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