Babbel’s new speech tools aim to boost foreign language confidence

Speaking a foreign language often comes with a fear of performance. What if you pronounce words wrong? What if your mind freezes? Undoubtedly, confidence in speaking a language other than your native one takes time to build, but the first step to getting there is actually simple: practice.

In the world of language apps, Babbel is launching two speech-based tools to help its users exercise their oral skills, overcome that fear, and feel comfortable while speaking.

The first new feature uses AI-powered speech recognition to provide users with support during vocabulary-based lessons and help them with pronunciation.

To evaluate the speaker’s pronunciation, Babbel’s AI model was trained on millions of data points from the company’s audio bank, using both correct and incorrect pronunciations, different voice ranges, and diverse accents and dialects — for example, Spanish from Argentina, Columbia, and Spain.

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Babbel AI speech-recognition tool