Speak

Speak — Support

Contact: anthony@homevote.io — a real person reads it. Include your iPhone model and iOS version if something is broken.

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How Speak works

Speak is a role-play: twelve everyday Flemish scenes (the bakery, the pharmacy, the tram…), each one a branching story you speak your way through.

1. The other character’s line is read aloud. Each word lights up as the voice reaches it, with a very literal gloss underneath so you can see which sound carries which meaning.
2. You choose what you say next — three replies, each taking the story somewhere else. Tap one and Speak reads it to you first.
3. The microphone opens on its own. You say your line out loud; words turn green as Speak hears them, and the ones that need another go get a brick-red underline. Tap any word to hear it alone, slowly.
4. Your take earns one to three stars and the story moves on. A weak take offers a retry — it never blocks the story.

Three stars means a Fleming would understand you without effort. You do not need to sound native — being clearly understood is the whole bar.

Common questions

Why is the download so big? The speech model that scores you is inside the app — about 339 MB of it. That is the price of your voice never leaving the phone. There is no smaller version that still works offline.

Does it need internet? No. Nothing in Speak needs a connection, at any point, after the download. Try it in Airplane Mode.

Is my voice recorded or uploaded? Neither. While you are scoring, the audio lives in memory for a few seconds and is then thrown away — it is never written to disk and never sent anywhere. The only audio that is saved is what you deliberately record in Lend your voice, and that stays on your phone until you email it yourself.

Nothing happens when I tap the microphone. iOS needs microphone permission. Settings ▸ Speak ▸ Microphone must be on. If you declined the first prompt, this is where you undo it.

My stars are low even though I said it right. Two things usually cause it:

• Background noise. The model is listening for your phonemes; a television or a café will bury them.
• Speaking before the mic is ready. Wait until your line shows it is listening — the first half-second is the part most often clipped off. Tap any word to hear that word on its own, slowly. That is usually faster than replaying the whole line. And a retry never costs anything: your best take is the one that counts.

It stops listening too early / too late. Speak ends an attempt when it has heard every word of your line, when it has heard enough speech and then a pause (about a second), or after a longer silence. If it cuts you off, you were probably pausing mid-sentence — say it as one phrase.

Can I slow the voice down? Yes. Tap the 🐢 in the header while playing a scene. Tapping a single word always plays it slowly.

How does progress work? Each scenario’s ring fills as you speak lines you had not spoken before, and its endings collect as you find them. There are no streaks, hearts or daily goals — progress is how much of each story you have explored, and it never decays.

I lost my progress. Progress is stored only on your device, so deleting and reinstalling Speak removes it permanently. There is no cloud copy and no way to recover it, because there is nowhere it could have been saved to. This is the flip side of the app having no account.

Which languages are supported? Speak 2.0 teaches Flemish Dutch, scene by scene. (Version 1.1’s five other courses were retired when the app became a role-play — going scene-first meant choosing one language and doing it properly. Lend your voice still collects native recordings for future languages.)

Can I see the translations in my own language? Tap Speak at the top of the library — the Translations in setting offers English, Dutch, French and German. It changes the line translations and the word-by-word gloss; the rest of the app stays in English.

Is it really free? Yes. No ads, no subscription, no in-app purchases, nothing locked, and nothing that interrupts play. One small permanent banner under the scenario library opens the story of vzw Hoop voor Hafsa, a Belgian non-profit, and the ways to help it open in Safari. No money goes through the app.

How do I delete my voice contributions? Tap the banner under the scenario library ▸ Lend your voice. Individual recordings can be deleted there, and so can all of them at once.

Privacy

See the privacy policy. Short version: Speak collects nothing, transmits nothing, and works offline.

Reporting a bug

Email anthony@homevote.io with:

• iPhone model and iOS version
• What you did, what happened, what you expected
• The sentence it happened on, if it was one particular sentence