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Learners of English of every age. Young children, from their very first words, learn with a grown-up nearby. School students and adults use it on their own, up to advanced English.

The learning screens are in English. Settings and help for grown-ups are in English or Japanese, following the device’s language.

iPhone and iPad with iOS or iPadOS 16.4 or later, and Android phones and tablets with Android 7 or later. Reading aloud to Pip on Android needs Android 13 or later.

PipTalk is free, with no ads and no in-app purchases.

Get it on the App Store or Google Play.

No. There’s no sign-in and no account. Open the app, tap Let’s go!, enter a name and choose a level.

Tap the gear at the top right of Home. Settings opens straight away: there’s nothing to buy and no links out of the app, so it has no grown-ups’ gate.

There are nine levels on one ladder, from Pre-5 (first words) to Grade 1 (advanced English). They match the EIKEN^® grades, from before Grade 5 up to Grade 1.

Stories, the trip, Real Life conversations, the games and the drill all follow the learner’s level. Choose it in setup, where each level shows, and Pip reads, a real sentence from its own stories. Change it any time in Settings › Grade.

It asks about ten “choose the best word” questions, two or three at each level: two right moves to a harder level, two wrong to an easier one. Then it suggests the level to start at. It takes about two minutes.

You’ll find it in setup (Not sure? Find my level) and in Settings › Grade. Nothing from it goes into My Words.

Never. After five articles or drills at the same level, Pip suggests moving up when nearly everything was right, or an easier level when most was wrong.

From Grade 3, learners choose on the results screen. At the young levels (Pre-5 to Grade 4), moving up is celebrated, and a grown-up makes the change in Settings › Grade.

No. The levels are matched to the EIKEN grades so it’s easy to find the right one, and the practice is written to match each grade’s published level. It isn’t official exam material, and PipTalk can’t predict test results.

EIKEN® is a registered trademark of the Eiken Foundation of Japan. PipTalk is not affiliated with, sponsored or endorsed by the Eiken Foundation.

No, it’s optional. Setup asks once, and Settings › Microphone turns it on or off for every learner on the device. Without it, Pip still reads everything aloud and leaves time to say each word after Pip.

On each article page, Pip starts listening by itself and the words turn green as you read them. If a word is misread or missed, Pip says it and you say it again; if Pip still doesn’t hear it after saying it twice, the reading carries on. Small words such as a, the and of never hold you up. When the page is read, the next arrow appears.

• Tap the microphone to pause. Listening also pauses while a word’s card is open.
• After about 30 seconds of silence, Pip stops and waits until you tap the microphone.
• Pip listens to the new words before an article too: once you’ve said a word right, Pip moves on to the next one.

Pip checks whole words with the device’s speech recognition. It isn’t a sound-by-sound pronunciation score.

Until a page has been read, the button at the bottom right is a quiet Skip ›. It moves on, and the page’s unread words count as helped, so you get fewer stars.

Stuck on a word? After a few seconds Pip says it for you. If Pip still doesn’t hear it after saying it twice, the reading carries on, and that word counts like a skipped one. In the new words, Skip goes to the next one, and a skipped word comes back in Daily Review.

Stars show how well you read aloud and answered. A word read right counts in full, a word put right with Pip’s help counts half, and a word skipped, or still not heard after Pip has said it twice, counts nothing. In an article, 90% or more gives three stars, 60% or more two, and less than that one.

No. Speech is recognised on the device only.

• On iPhone and iPad, PipTalk never uses Apple’s servers for it.
• On Android, listening needs Android 13 or later.
• If a device can’t recognise speech offline, Pip doesn’t listen there; recording yourself to listen back still works.

Recordings to listen back are played on the device and deleted straight away. No audio or transcript is ever stored, uploaded or shared.

PipTalk reads aloud with a natural, human-like AI voice that’s made on the device (Supertonic 3 by Supertone, under the OpenRAIL-M licence). On iPhone, iPad and Android, it downloads by itself, once, the first time the device is on Wi-Fi: about 130 MB, from GitHub, where the voice is published. It needs about 500 MB of free space. Until it’s ready, the device’s own voice reads aloud.

• It never uses mobile data by itself.
• Settings › Voice shows its progress, and can download it now over mobile data, or remove it.
• There too, choose who reads (a woman or a man) and how each voice sounds. Pip reads in American English.

No personal information is sent with the download.

Yes. Everything works without the internet, except the first download of the natural voice.

If the device ever clears space and removes the voice, it downloads again the next time the device is on Wi-Fi, and the device’s own voice reads in the meantime.

Yes. Add one in Settings › Learners › Add a learner. Each learner has their own level, progress, stars and hero. With more than one, the app opens on Who’s learning?

In your own iCloud, by itself, with the Apple Account the device already uses: there’s no sign-in. Every learner comes back on a new iPhone or iPad, and progress stays the same on each device with that Apple Account. Settings › Backup shows when it was last saved.

It goes only to your iCloud, never to us.

The phone’s own backup to your Google Account keeps the progress, when backup is turned on in the phone’s settings.

With a backup code. On the first device, go to Settings › Backup and tap Copy backup code. On the other device, paste it in Settings › Backup › Restore from code, or tap Restore from a backup code during setup.

Restoring adds the learners beside the ones already there. If the same learner is on both, the one with more progress is kept. It never removes anyone.

A backup code contains your learners’ progress. It’s made only when you copy it, and goes only where you paste it.

In Settings › Learners:

• Reset this learner’s progress erases their stars, words, hero and settings. Setup starts again, keeping their name and level.
• Delete removes a learner.
• Delete all data deletes every learner on this device and PipTalk’s copy in your iCloud. Your other iPhones and iPads remove those learners too.

These can’t be undone. Deleting the app removes everything on the device, but not the copy in your iCloud: use Delete all data first to remove that as well.

Tap any word in a story or article to see what it means, in the sense it’s used in the text, in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, French or Vietnamese. Choose the language in Settings › Meaning hints. Pictures and sounds always stay in English.

• Text follows the device’s text size, up to 1.3 times on learning screens and twice in Settings, so every screen stays usable.
• With Reduce Motion on (Remove animations on Android), there’s no confetti, and Pip and the pictures stop bobbing and floating.
• Buttons have labels for VoiceOver and TalkBack.
• Every word and instruction is spoken, and the reading font, Andika, is designed for new readers.
• Mistakes are never shown in red: a wrong answer gets a gentle “try again”.
• The app turns with the device, upright or sideways.

Only what it needs to remember each learner: their first name (optional), progress, stars and settings. They’re kept on the device and, on iPhone and iPad, in your own iCloud.

Nothing about you or your child is ever sent to us: there are no ads, no analytics and no servers of ours that receive it. Read the privacy policy.