Speak
Speaking-first AI language app (Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Chinese). Uses the learner's mistakes and history to generate personalised review; Premium Plus adds 'Made for You' lessons from gaps and an AI Speak Tutor. Business edition with admin progress tracking.
Active · Verified 2026-10-22 · fresh as of 2026-10-22 · 33 cited facts, 7 with a third-party source · 1 recorded change · Suggest a correction
At a glance
- Type
- Onboarding curriculum + per-session conversation vendor fix
- Tier
- T2
- Created
- 2016 (Speak founded by Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu; Thiel Fellowship; San Francisco; YC backed) third-party fix
- Latest release
- not applicable — not OSS fix
- License
- not applicable — not OSS fix
- GitHub
- not applicable — no GitHub repo fix
- Pricing
- 7-day free trial; Premium and Premium Plus subscriptions (price varies by region, shown in-app); Speak for Business vendor fix
- Funding
- $162M total raised; Series C $78M at $1B valuation (Accel/OpenAI/Khosla/YC) Dec 2024 third-party fix
- Freshness
- 2026-10-22 fix
- Layer
- agent-infra repo fix
- Licensing
- commercial vendor fix
Memory taxonomy
- storage
- relational
- retrieval
- injection
- persistence
- cross-session
- update
- overwrite
- unit
- profile
- governance
- inspectable
- conflict
- overwrite
When to use
Optimised for: learner profile + spaced repetition + assessment-driven adaptation
Anti-fit: not for non-educational use cases
Pros & cons
Pros
Strongest real-time conversational AI of any language app — speech recognition, scenario roleplay, instant feedback are tightly integrated; OpenAI-backed.
Cons
Cross-session memory acknowledged as a gap by reviewers — no SRS, no systematic error tracking across conversations; Phrasebook is passive rather than adaptive.
Claims & capabilities
10M+ users; doubling annually for five years. $78M Series C at $1B (Dec 2024); $100M revenue 2025.
Technical surface
- API surface
- searched not found
- Backend storage
- searched not found
- Deployment
- iOS + Android + Web + Enterprise embedded
- Embedding model
- searched not found
- Multi-tenancy
- searched not found
- MCP
- no MCP support advertised — vertical product, no MCP server / client integration documented
- A2A
- no A2A protocol support advertised — vertical product, no A2A integration documented
- OpenTelemetry
- no OpenTelemetry integration advertised — vendor logs/observability not publicly documented
Alternatives to Speak → live options ranked by shared design, licence, hosting and MCP support
Similar systems
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- ASAPP GenerativeAgent T1
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Sources (32 cited facts, 7 third-party)
Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).
- What it is Onboarding curriculum + per-session conversation vendor
- What it does & what's distinct Speaking-first AI language app (Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Chinese). Us… vendor
- Claims / benefits 10M+ users; doubling annually for five years. $78M Series C at $1B (Dec 2024); $100M rev… vendor
- Modalities voice + text vendor
- Created 2016 (Speak founded by Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu; Thiel Fellowship; San Francisco; YC … third-party
- Funding $162M total raised; Series C $78M at $1B valuation (Accel/OpenAI/Khosla/YC) Dec 2024 third-party
- Customers / scale 10M+ users; 40+ countries; 1B+ sentences spoken in 2024 vendor
- Pricing 7-day free trial; Premium and Premium Plus subscriptions (price varies by region, shown … vendor
- Compliance GDPR-compliant (enterprise compliance/procurement discussions available) vendor
- Data handling Voice data used for ASR improvement under privacy policy; enterprise data handling via B… vendor
- Deployment iOS + Android + Web + Enterprise embedded vendor
- HQ US (San Francisco) third-party
- Founders / pedigree Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu (co-founders; Thiel Fellowship) third-party
- Memory volume / scale internal — undisclosed (10M+ users; $100M revenue 2025) vendor
- Schema evolution schema with migration vendor
- Namespace primitives per-user vendor
- Contradiction handling always overwrite (last-write-wins) vendor
- Validated verticals K-12 + higher-ed + adult learners (language, study tools, tutoring) vendor
- Time to running <10min (hosted SaaS sign-up) vendor
- Anti-fit not for non-educational use cases vendor
- Optimised for learner profile + spaced repetition + assessment-driven adaptation vendor
- Adjacent infrastructure self-contained app + LMS integration where applicable vendor
- Pros Strongest real-time conversational AI of any language app — speech recognition, scenario… vendor
- Cons Cross-session memory acknowledged as a gap by reviewers — no SRS, no systematic error tr… vendor
- Project & sources speak.com OpenAI case study TC Series C vendor
- cost-pricing-model subscription third-party
- cost-last-verified 2026-06-29 third-party
- adoption-accelerator yc-w17 third-party
- architecture-deployment-locus cloud vendor
- licensing-bucket commercial vendor
- positioning-platform-vs-product product vendor
- taxonomy-three-layer-rollup agent-infra repo
What changed
Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)
Related systems
References (1)
- OpenAI GPT family (GPT-5 / GPT-4o / o3 / o4) depends on at runtime — OpenAI-backed.