Is AI Actually Good For English Speaking Practice?

AI English apps promise confidence, fluency and better speaking practice. But how helpful are they really when it comes to building confidence in real conversations?

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In this episode of the Hey Lady! Confident English Podcast, Emma explores why so many women are curious about AI for English speaking practice, what these tools do well, and what they still can't replace when it comes to building real confidence and fluency.

You'll learn why real conversations are often messy and unpredictable, why confidence is about much more than accuracy, and why meaningful human connection still matters so much in language learning and in life!

🎧 In this episode:
00:00 AI apps promise a lot, but do they really work?
01:39 A listener question from Brazil
02:20 Why AI feels safer than real conversations
04:11 The problem with AI speaking practice
07:54 What's missing from AI English practice?
09:57 Why group conversations matter
11:01 A better way to practise speaking English
12:31 Are you ready to step outside the AI bubble?

If you believe that human connection is important but you are also curious about how AI English speaking practice apps influence your confidence and competence to communicate in real life this episode is for you!

💬 About Emma

Emma is the founder of Hey Lady! and creator of the YouTube channel mmmEnglish, trusted by more than 6 million English learners worldwide.

Hey Lady! is a global English-speaking community for women who want to build confidence through real conversations, connection and consistent practice.

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https://mmm.heylady.io/free-trial

#EnglishConfidence #SpeakEnglish #LearnEnglish

🙋‍♀️ Have a question or challenge you'd like Emma to talk about in a future episode?
You can send a voice message or share your experience below.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

AI apps and language tutors are everywhere these days. They promise to make you fluent. They promise to make you confident. So do they actually work? In the apps and tools that I've tried, and from what our members have shared with me, I've noticed a few things that don't align with true fluency, and things that might not give you the confidence that you need in those moments that really matter. Hello, hello. Welcome back to everyone joining me from all around the world today. My name is Emma. I'm the founder of Hey Lady! an online community that connects women through English. We bring together women who've learned English as a second language to practise speaking in real conversations in a supportive space so that we have the confidence to use English in the moments that really matter, at work, when we're traveling, and in everyday life. If you've been learning English for a while now, but you still struggle to speak confidently, you are in the right place. You can join me and thousands of others around the world right here every week as we break down the barriers that stop you or keep you from speaking confidently in English. All right. Let's get into the episode. This week's episode was inspired by a question sent by Marina from Brazil. Hello, Emma. I've been seeing so many ads for AI apps to speak English. They all say they will correct all my mistakes and help me get fluent and confident faster. But you're always telling us that we need to speak with real people. So I would like to ask, what you think about AI, and does it really work? Marina, great question, and honestly, you're not the only one wondering this right now. I think the reason why so many of us are drawn to AI for speaking practice is because it feels, it feels safe. It's available whenever you want, instantaneously. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't judge you, and it corrects every mistake. So for many women, this feels like the perfect solution. And in many ways, AI is really helpful, especially with generating ideas and answering questions, providing role plays, improving the way that you write. When you're a beginner, it can be really, really helpful to prompt your speaking practice in this way. But if you're at an intermediate level or higher, I think that choosing AI as a way to build your confidence and your fluency speaking is something that you need to be a little cautious about. So what do I mean by that? Well, look, there's a very clear pattern among the thousands of women that we've helped at Hey Lady! Women who have arrived with a belief that they need to be correct before they feel confident. That their English has to be perfect, otherwise they won't be understood, or even worse, they might be judged. Maybe you can relate to these same thoughts or feelings as well, but here's why it's a problem. These AI apps that correct you all the time are focused on your accuracy, so they're highlighting errors, they're giving you a score, they tell you what you got wrong, and then they tell you in the next sentence, and again, and again. When you're first learning English, accuracy is really important. It's that input. You're learning basic grammar. You're learning the words that you need to describe the world around you. It gives you that solid foundation. But once you move beyond that beginner stage, there are so many other skills that become much more useful, much more useful than just the input, the knowledge on its own. By training you to think about grammar rules while you're speaking, AI tools are reinforcing the idea that English is a test that you have to pass every time, that every single sentence is right or it's wrong. There's something to fix or there's not. But the thing that I want you to keep in mind is that speaking English, having a conversation with someone, that's not an exam. It's an exchange. We're passing messages. We're sharing thoughts and opinions and ideas between each other. And just like in your native language, that exchange when you're speaking? It's often imperfect. You've gotta be thinking on your feet and reacting to things. You've gotta find ways to use the language that you already have to find points of connection between you and the person that you're talking to, and this is all so you can have a positive experience together. A successful experience together. We've been doing this since we were kids, and we're still doing it today as adults. It's this lifelong learning and evolution. In natural conversations, if you choose the wrong word or you break a grammar rule, the conversation doesn't stop while the other person corrects you, does it? Real conversations are often a little bit messy. They're often unpredictable, and it's about reacting to those different variations or those different moments and building up the confidence to be able to do that. With AI, you can't practise what happens when someone interrupts you, or when they can't find the right word, or when the conversation starts to take an unexpected turn and you feel your face getting hot and your blood rising, right? These are the real and unescapable moments of communicating in real time with real people who are right there in front of you. These moments, the ones when our fear of being judged quickly begins to appear, these moments, they, they are gonna happen. And in my opinion, speaking with an AI is like a bubble where nothing can go wrong. Yes, it might feel comfortable right now, but it's not real. So what's the missing piece then? Something that I think we can all agree on is that AI is definitely programmed to please us. And hey, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Most of the time it feels really good to have someone telling you that your ideas are great and that you're really awesome. I, I like it as well. But in many ways, it's kind of a false or an artificial sense of achievement, right? You didn't really get to know each other. You didn't truly connect. You never persuaded someone to a different point of view. That conversation wasn't meaningful. It was, it was functional. And when you look closely at what makes a conversation meaningful, you realise that it's exactly what AI is missing. Empathy. It can't put itself in your shoes or compare its life to your life experiences. It didn't grow up somewhere. It can't genuinely share a nostalgic tradition from your home country or share what it feels like to celebrate a new child coming into your family. Real people bring lived experience. And AI can be programmed to predict or to guess the right words to say, perhaps what to say when you're feeling tired or grieving or angry or proud, but it doesn't understand what it feels like to be excluded or to be left out or to feel the joy of finally being included in a conversation. It's never actually lived those experiences because it's artificial. And one last thought that I have about this is that AI is great at one-to-one, but life is not one-to-one. Your work meetings, your family dinners, social events, they involve groups, and each person brings their own personality and tone. So navigating that requires experience with other people, different people, different personalities. This is where you learn how to read the room. This is what we say in English. It's where we get to learn from social cues or cultural cues of seeing or hearing or watching people interact with each other in the spaces in front of us. Communicating with a group of people is where so much learning happens, so many skills develop, skills that are impossible to develop in one-to-one AI conversations. So what's the better path forward? The women who've made the biggest breakthroughs in our community are not necessarily the ones with the best grammar or the widest knowledge. They're the ones who showed up and spoke with lots of different people and learned to express their ideas about different topics in different contexts. They learned how to connect with their identity and their true self in English. They didn't wait until they were perfect. They started talking, and from there they grew. They gained experience using the language that they already knew, that they had inside them already, and they proved to themselves, "Hey, I can be understood. I can connect, and I'm actually having a good time." Even if they're making mistakes. Improving your accuracy, learning new grammar, more vocabulary, more phrasal verbs, more slang, all of those things become much easier once you build the capacity and the confidence to speak with the language that you already have. Here's what I want you to take away from today. AI is a tool. It's a useful tool, and it definitely has a place in language learning. But it can't replace the experience of real human interaction, real conversation. That's what we're here for, right? AI doesn't care about the journey that you're on. It doesn't understand the challenges or even the trivial little moments that pop up during your day. I know that for many of you, taking that first step to start speaking more, to speak more regularly, knowing that it's gonna be a little messy and knowing that you will make mistakes and feel a bit flustered, that can be difficult, and it can be a little scary. It can be something that you put off and off and off. But the fear that you feel about speaking to real people is exactly why you need to do it. It's where that real growth happens, in the messy middle. You don't need more corrections from a robot, sorry, AI, but you don't need more corrections. You don't need to perpetuate that belief that it has to be perfect, that you have to fix it. Instead, commit to showing up with other real people and work it out together. Work on these challenges together. That's exactly what happens inside Hey Lady! Inside Hey Lady!, you can practise with real women who understand exactly how you feel, who are working through those same challenges, or who were exactly where you are right now. And they know how to make you feel safe and supported and encouraged as you are doing something hard and challenging and difficult. If you'd like to come and try Hey Lady! out, you can find the link down in the show notes in the description. You can start with a free trial and come along to your first conversation this week, tomorrow, right now. Thank you so much for being here today. I want you to remember that nothing beats real human connection. You are perfectly imperfect, just like the rest of us. See you next time!