The Best Speak Alternative for Real Conversation (2026)

If you know the Speak app and want to actually converse instead of working through a course, the best alternative is Mintza. Speak is an excellent, OpenAI-backed curriculum of lessons, drills, and roleplays. Mintza does one thing instead: open, free-form voice conversation with a bilingual AI teacher that follows your lead and rescues you in your own language. Here is an honest comparison of both.

We fetched Speak’s website and its App Store listing in July 2026 to confirm its features, approach, and pricing before writing a word. Where prices vary by country or promotion, we point you to the current in-app figure rather than a number that goes stale.

What Speak does well

Speak is a genuinely good product, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. It is a polished, AI-powered spoken-language trainer built by Speakeasy Labs and powered by OpenAI, whose OpenAI Startup Fund backed the company and whose technology powers its live speaking features.

Its strength is structure. Speak gives you a path to follow instead of a blank page. The App Store listing describes the core pieces: interactive video lessons that introduce pronunciation and vocabulary, speaking drills that have you repeat and vary sentence patterns, vocabulary games, and audio-first roleplays that simulate real scenarios, all with real-time feedback on pronunciation and grammar. If you are a beginner who does not know where to start, that guided curriculum is exactly what you want. Someone tells you what to say, you say it, and the app tells you how close you got.

Speak also supports a solid set of target languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, and it has been downloaded and rated well by millions of people. It is not a toy. It is a serious course.

Where Speak has limits

Two things about Speak matter if your goal is real conversation.

First, it is curriculum-led. The heart of Speak is a structured course you move through, lessons, drills, and games, with roleplays built around defined scenarios. That is a feature, not a flaw, for people who want guidance. But it is not the same as an open conversation that can go anywhere you take it. A scripted roleplay about ordering coffee is not the same as telling someone about the argument you had yesterday and having them react.

Second, Speak has historically been built around learning English. Its rise to a billion-dollar valuation was driven by teaching English to speakers of other languages, and it has been expanding into other target languages from that base. The course path is guided rather than a free, two-way conversation you steer yourself.

Neither of these makes Speak bad. They just define who it is for. Speak is for the learner who wants a syllabus.

What Mintza does differently

Mintza is conversation-first. There is no course to complete and no drills to grind. You open the app, pick your language and level, and start talking out loud about anything you want. Your teacher, a bilingual AI voice powered by Gemini Live Audio, talks back in real time and follows wherever you take the conversation. Your day, your work, the trip that makes you nervous. It is a real conversation, not a script.

The second difference is the rescue. Mintza is genuinely bilingual, so when you lose a word or need something explained, your teacher drops into the language you already speak, hands you what you were missing, and brings you straight back into the conversation. You are never left stranded mid-sentence. This is why people who freeze when a real person waits for them can still get through a conversation from day one. We wrote about why that gap exists in why Duolingo doesn’t teach you to speak.

Mintza also works in either direction across fifteen languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Greek, Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Swedish, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and Hebrew. You pick the language you are learning and the language you already speak, any pair, and switch anytime. And you can choose a regional accent to practice with, British or Australian English, Madrid or Buenos Aires Spanish, and many more, which matters more than people expect. We covered that in which accent should I learn.

What Mintza is not: it is not a drills-and-games curriculum. If you want a lesson path with pronunciation scoring and vocabulary matching, Speak does that and Mintza does not. Being honest about that is the point. Mintza is for people whose main goal is to talk.

Speak vs Mintza, side by side

Sources for Speak’s figures: the Speak website and its App Store listing, both fetched in July 2026. Mintza’s figures are from the Mintza product page.

Pricing, honestly

Both apps are subscriptions, and neither is free forever. Here is the fair read.

Speak offers annual plans, which is real money saved if you commit. Its Premium tier runs about $17.99 per month or $83.99 per year, and Premium Plus about $39.99 per month or $164.99 per year, with a 7-day free trial, per its App Store listing. Paying yearly brings the effective monthly cost well below any monthly plan, so if you know you will stick with it for a year, Speak’s annual pricing is the cheaper path.

Mintza is monthly only, and it sells talk time by the minute rather than unlimited access. Basic is $17.99 per month for 180 minutes, Plus is $34.99 for 360 minutes, and Pro is $49.99 for 600 minutes, with no daily cap on how you spend them. You start with ten free minutes after signing in with Google or Apple, no card required, and those free minutes never expire, so there is no trial clock. Unused paid minutes do not roll over, and you cancel anytime from your phone. If you want to pay month to month, test with genuinely free minutes, and buy exactly the talk time you need, Mintza’s model fits. If you want the lowest locked-in yearly rate, Speak’s annual plan wins.

Who each app is for

Choose Speak if you are a beginner or you want a guided course. If you like being told what to learn next, drilling patterns until they stick, and getting pronunciation scored step by step, Speak’s structured curriculum is excellent and its annual pricing is friendly. It is a serious, well-built path from zero.

Choose Mintza if your main goal is to talk. If you already understand the language but freeze when someone waits for you to answer, you do not need more lessons, you need reps in real conversation with something that rescues you when you stall. That is the whole of what Mintza does: open voice conversation, in either direction across fifteen languages, with a bilingual teacher that meets you at your level and picks you up in your own language when you get stuck. We put Mintza against the wider field in the best AI apps to practice speaking a language, and looked at practicing at home in language immersion without moving abroad.

The two are not really rivals for the same moment. Speak teaches you the language. Mintza gets you talking in it. Plenty of people would benefit from both, a course to build the foundation and open conversation to actually loosen the tongue.

Try Mintza free

You can find out in ten minutes whether open conversation is what you have been missing. Sign in with Google or Apple, get your ten free minutes, no subscription and no card, and have a real conversation today.

Download Mintza for iPhone, iPad and Mac or for Android, or read more on the Mintza product page.