Is AI Actually Good For English Speaking Practice?

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1. 0:00AI apps and language tutors are everywhere these days.
2. 0:04They promise to make you fluent.
3. 0:07They promise to make you confident.
4. 0:09So do they actually work?
5. 0:11In 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.
6. 0:29Hello, hello.
7. 0:40Welcome back to everyone joining me from all around the world today.
8. 0:45My name is Emma.
9. 0:46I'm the founder of Hey Lady! an online community that connects women through English.
10. 0:53We 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.
11. 1:14If you've been learning English for a while now, but you still struggle to speak confidently, you are in the right place.
12. 1:23You 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.
13. 1:38All right.
14. 1:39Let's get into the episode.
15. 1:41This week's episode was inspired by a question sent by Marina from Brazil.
16. 1:56Hello, Emma.
17. 1:57I've been seeing so many ads for AI apps to speak English.
18. 2:02They all say they will correct all my mistakes and help me get fluent and confident faster.
19. 2:10But you're always telling us that we need to speak with real people.
20. 2:15So I would like to ask, what you think about AI, and does it really work?
21. 2:20Marina, great question, and honestly, you're not the only one wondering this right now.
22. 2:28I think the reason why so many of us are drawn to AI for speaking practice is because it feels, it feels safe.
23. 2:37It's available whenever you want, instantaneously.
24. 2:42It doesn't get tired.
25. 2:43It doesn't judge you, and it corrects every mistake.
26. 2:48So for many women, this feels like the perfect solution.
27. 2:54And in many ways, AI is really helpful, especially with generating ideas and answering questions, providing role plays, improving the way that you write.
28. 3:09When you're a beginner, it can be really, really helpful to prompt your speaking practice in this way.
29. 3:17But 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.
30. 3:31So what do I mean by that?
31. 3:39Well, 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.
32. 3:54That their English has to be perfect, otherwise they won't be understood, or even worse, they might be judged.
33. 4:04Maybe you can relate to these same thoughts or feelings as well, but here's why it's a problem.
34. 4:11These 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.
35. 4:27When you're first learning English, accuracy is really important.
36. 4:32It's that input.
37. 4:33You're learning basic grammar.
38. 4:35You're learning the words that you need to describe the world around you.
39. 4:40It gives you that solid foundation.
40. 4:43But 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.
41. 4:58By 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.
42. 5:14There's something to fix or there's not.
43. 5:17But the thing that I want you to keep in mind is that speaking English, having a conversation with someone, that's not an exam.
44. 5:30It's an exchange.
45. 5:32We're passing messages.
46. 5:35We're sharing thoughts and opinions and ideas between each other.
47. 5:40And just like in your native language, that exchange when you're speaking?
48. 5:47It's often imperfect.
49. 5:50You've gotta be thinking on your feet and reacting to things.
50. 5:54You'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.
51. 6:08A successful experience together.
52. 6:11We've been doing this since we were kids, and we're still doing it today as adults.
53. 6:17It's this lifelong learning and evolution.
54. 6:21In 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?
55. 6:34Real conversations are often a little bit messy.
56. 6:38They'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.
57. 6:50With 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?
58. 7:10These are the real and unescapable moments of communicating in real time with real people who are right there in front of you.
59. 7:22These moments, the ones when our fear of being judged quickly begins to appear, these moments, they, they are gonna happen.
60. 7:35And in my opinion, speaking with an AI is like a bubble where nothing can go wrong.
61. 7:43Yes, it might feel comfortable right now, but it's not real.
62. 7:48So what's the missing piece then?
63. 7:57Something that I think we can all agree on is that AI is definitely programmed to please us.
64. 8:06And hey, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.
65. 8:10Most of the time it feels really good to have someone telling you that your ideas are great and that you're really awesome.
66. 8:19I, I like it as well.
67. 8:20But in many ways, it's kind of a false or an artificial sense of achievement, right?
68. 8:28You didn't really get to know each other.
69. 8:32You didn't truly connect.
70. 8:35You never persuaded someone to a different point of view.
71. 8:40That conversation wasn't meaningful.
72. 8:44It was, it was functional.
73. 8:46And when you look closely at what makes a conversation meaningful, you realise that it's exactly what AI is missing.
74. 8:56Empathy.
75. 8:58It can't put itself in your shoes or compare its life to your life experiences.
76. 9:06It didn't grow up somewhere.
77. 9:09It 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.
78. 9:20Real people bring lived experience.
79. 9:24And 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.
80. 9:50It's never actually lived those experiences because it's artificial.
81. 9:57And one last thought that I have about this is that AI is great at one-to-one, but life is not one-to-one.
82. 10:08Your work meetings, your family dinners, social events, they involve groups, and each person brings their own personality and tone.
83. 10:18So navigating that requires experience with other people, different people, different personalities.
84. 10:27This is where you learn how to read the room.
85. 10:31This is what we say in English.
86. 10:33It'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.
87. 10:47Communicating 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.
88. 11:01So what's the better path forward?
89. 11:03The women who've made the biggest breakthroughs in our community are not necessarily the ones with the best grammar or the widest knowledge.
90. 11:17They'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.
91. 11:28They learned how to connect with their identity and their true self in English.
92. 11:35They didn't wait until they were perfect.
93. 11:38They started talking, and from there they grew.
94. 11:43They 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.
95. 12:03Improving 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.
96. 12:32Here's what I want you to take away from today.
97. 12:34AI is a tool.
98. 12:37It's a useful tool, and it definitely has a place in language learning.
99. 12:44But it can't replace the experience of real human interaction, real conversation.
100. 12:52That's what we're here for, right?
101. 12:55AI doesn't care about the journey that you're on.
102. 12:58It doesn't understand the challenges or even the trivial little moments that pop up during your day.
103. 13:05I 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.
104. 13:25It can be something that you put off and off and off.
105. 13:28But the fear that you feel about speaking to real people is exactly why you need to do it.
106. 13:39It's where that real growth happens, in the messy middle.
107. 13:44You don't need more corrections from a robot, sorry, AI, but you don't need more corrections.
108. 13:51You don't need to perpetuate that belief that it has to be perfect, that you have to fix it.
109. 13:58Instead, commit to showing up with other real people and work it out together.
110. 14:07Work on these challenges together.
111. 14:10That'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.
112. 14:29And they know how to make you feel safe and supported and encouraged as you are doing something hard and challenging and difficult.
113. 14:38If you'd like to come and try Hey Lady! out, you can find the link down in the show notes in the description.
114. 14:45You can start with a free trial and come along to your first conversation this week, tomorrow, right now.
115. 14:54Thank you so much for being here today.
116. 14:56I want you to remember that nothing beats real human connection.
117. 15:02You are perfectly imperfect, just like the rest of us.
118. 15:08See you next time!