Frequently asked questions

Conversa is an AI conversation tutor and pronunciation coach for European Portuguese, on iPhone and iPad. You hold real conversations — by voice or by typing — with a tutor that speaks the Portuguese people actually speak in Portugal, and you get your pronunciation scored word by word.

It is deliberately narrow. There are no flashcards, no streaks and no grammar drills. It does the one thing most language apps skip, which is getting you talking.

You pick a persona (one of three European Portuguese voices), a CEFR level from A1 to C2, and a mode — free talk, a role-play like the café or the farmácia, a debate, or a topic you type in yourself. Then you talk. You can speak or type, and switch between the two mid-conversation.

You also choose how you want to be corrected before you start, so the tutor is not interrupting you constantly if you would rather just keep the conversation moving. At the end you get a feedback report on what went well and what to work on.

Most people learning a language have plenty of input and almost no output. They can read a menu and follow a podcast, and then freeze when a real person asks them something. The bottleneck is not vocabulary, it is the fact that speaking has never been practised under any pressure at all.

So Conversa optimises for time spent speaking, and for the specific anxiety of speaking badly in front of someone. An AI tutor is infinitely patient, never bored and never judging you, which makes it a much lower-stakes place to be bad at Portuguese than a real conversation is. The goal is that by the time you have the real conversation, you have already had it fifty times.

Partly. At A1 the tutor speaks slowly, keeps to short sentences, uses simple vocabulary and offers suggested replies you can tap rather than compose, so you are not staring at a blank screen. Role-plays work well early because the situation gives you the script.

But an honest answer: if you have never seen any Portuguese at all, a conversation app is not the fastest way to start. Get a few weeks of basic vocabulary and present tense from anywhere you like, then come here — Conversa is at its best converting knowledge you already have into speech you can produce.

No, and the app is shaped around that. Ten minutes of actual talking beats an hour of passive study, and short daily sessions beat one long weekly one. A single conversation is useful at five minutes.

There is deliberately no streak counter, no daily goal and no notification guilting you back in. If you skip four days, nothing is lost and nothing scolds you.

European Portuguese (pt-PT), only. This is the entire reason Conversa exists. Most apps that offer "Portuguese" are teaching Brazilian Portuguese, sometimes with a Portuguese flag on it, and learners who are moving to Portugal find out too late.

Conversa is pt-PT throughout: the tutor, the voices, the bundled phrase library of nearly 3,000 sentences, and the pronunciation scoring.

Every reply is checked before you see it. AI models are trained on far more Brazilian Portuguese than European Portuguese, so left alone they drift — this is the single most common failure in Portuguese language apps and it is why a promise alone is not worth much.

So Conversa checks each tutor reply against a European Portuguese lint and regenerates it rather than show you a Brazilian marker. The lint catches você used as the default second person where pt-PT uses tu, the progressive gerund (estou fazendo instead of estou a fazer), and Brazilian vocabulary — suco, ônibus, trem, celular instead of sumo, autocarro, comboio, telemóvel. Spelling follows the Acordo Ortográfico.

It can. The lint catches the markers it knows about, and no finite list of markers covers a whole language variety — it is a strong filter, not a proof. If you spot something that is not how it is said in Portugal, please email it to me and it goes into the lint.

The flag rate is also monitored as a drift meter: if the underlying AI model starts leaning more Brazilian after an update, the rate climbs and I see it.

Three European Portuguese neural voices — Raquel, Duarte and Fernanda — which you choose between as tutor personas. They are Portuguese voices from Portugal, not Brazilian voices reading pt-PT text, which is a distinction you can hear immediately and which many apps get wrong.

No, and there are no plans to. European Portuguese is a variety that the big apps treat as an afterthought, and doing it properly means pt-PT-specific work — the dialect lint, the pronunciation scoring, the phrase library — that does not generalise to other languages. Adding Spanish would mean doing all of it again, badly.

Yes — this is the second of the app's two surfaces. You hear a native-quality pt-PT phrase, record yourself saying it, and get accuracy and fluency scores broken down word by word, so you can see exactly which word let the sentence down rather than just being told you scored 72.

The app also keeps track of which sounds you repeatedly struggle with, so your trouble spots accumulate into something you can actually work on. European Portuguese is unusually hard here — the reduced unstressed vowels and the swallowed sounds are what make it sound so different to Brazilian Portuguese, and they are what most learners get wrong.

You choose the style before the conversation starts. The tutor can correct you as you go, or hold corrections until the end so the conversation flows, or stay largely out of the way and only flag things that would actually cause a misunderstanding.

Either way you get a feedback report when you finish, covering the patterns rather than every individual slip.

Usually one of three things. Background noise is the most common — speech recognition degrades quickly in a café or with a TV on. Second, if you are speaking very quietly or very far from the phone, try holding it closer or using headphones with a mic. Third, heavily accented or hesitant early-learner speech is genuinely harder to transcribe, and this improves as you do.

If a specific word is consistently misheard, that is often useful information rather than a bug — it may well be mis-heard by a person too.

On the iOS keyboard, press and hold the base letter and the accented options appear above your finger — hold a for á à â ã, c for ç, e for é ê, o for ó ô õ. Slide onto the one you want and let go.

You can also add the Portuguese keyboard in iOS Settings → General → Keyboard, which additionally gives you Portuguese autocorrect and predictions. If you would rather not deal with it at all, just speak instead of typing.

Conversa is free to download, and free to keep using: you get a few minutes of voice conversation every day, which resets daily and does not expire, plus generous text chat.

If you want more than that, Conversa Pro is €8.99 per month (£7.99 in the UK), which gives you a pool of 200 minutes of voice conversation per month and unlimited text. That is the cheapest monthly plan in this category — comparable AI conversation tutors start around €10 and go well past €20.

Prices shown are what you pay, including VAT.

The features are the same. Free and Pro both get the full tutor, all three voices, all the modes and role-plays, the pronunciation scoring and the feedback reports. Nothing is walled off.

The only difference is how much voice conversation you get: free gives you a few minutes each day that refill every day, Pro gives you a monthly pool of 200 minutes. Text chat is generous on both.

Because voice is essentially the whole cost of running the app and text is nearly free. Turning your speech into text and the tutor's reply into natural-sounding audio costs real money per minute; the AI generating the words is a rounding error next to it.

Pricing that pretends otherwise ends up either expensive for everyone or quietly throttled for the people who use it most. I would rather be straightforward: talk is metered, typing is not.

Voice conversation pauses until your allowance refills — the next day on free, the next billing month on Pro — and text chat carries on working the whole time. Nothing is deleted and no conversation is lost.

The 200-minute Pro pool is sized so that very few subscribers reach it; it exists to stop a handful of extremely heavy users making the price unsustainable for everyone else, not to catch you out.

No, and this is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. At €8.99 the usual 30–40% annual discount would leave almost nothing on a service that has a real per-minute cost — a year sold at that rate barely clears what it costs to run. The options were a higher headline price with an annual discount, or a low monthly price with no discount, and I went with the low monthly price.

You can cancel any month, which is worth more than a discount you have to pay a year upfront for.

Through Apple, not through me. On your iPhone or iPad open Settings, tap your name at the top, then Subscriptions, then Conversa, then Cancel Subscription. You keep Pro until the end of the period you have already paid for, and then drop back to the free daily allowance — the app keeps working.

Because the subscription is billed by Apple, refunds are also handled by Apple, at reportaproblem.apple.com.

No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address to give. You download the app and start a conversation.

Your subscription, if you buy one, is attached to your Apple ID, which is what lets it restore on your other devices and work with Family Sharing. Conversa itself never holds a name, an email or a password, because it does not have an account system for them to live in.

Yes. It is one subscription tied to your Apple ID, so it covers every device signed in to that Apple ID, and the monthly voice pool is shared across them rather than duplicated.

Your conversation history, though, is stored on each device rather than synced between them — see below.

iPhone and iPad, as a native universal app, requiring iOS or iPadOS 26 or later. It is one app that adapts to both rather than a phone app stretched onto a tablet.

Not at the moment. Conversa is built by one person, and building it natively for one platform properly is a better use of that person than building it adequately for three. If it finds an audience, Android is the likelier second platform.

Conversa is in active development and is not yet on the App Store. I would rather not announce a date I might miss. If you would like to know when it lands, email me and I will let you know.

As little as is possible while still running a subscription. There is no account, so there is no name, email address or password. What the service holds is an anonymous identifier, how many voice minutes it has counted against it, and whether it has an active subscription. Nothing that identifies you as a person.

The full detail is in the privacy policy.

Yes, on your device. Your transcripts and their feedback reports are stored in a local database on your iPhone or iPad so you can search past conversations and pick one up where you left off. You can delete any conversation from History, and deleting the app deletes all of it.

Your pronunciation scores and, if you turn it on, the short facts the tutor remembers about you between sessions are stored the same way — on the device, listed in Settings, deletable individually.

No. Your conversations are not used to train models, mine or anyone else's, and they are not sold or shared. The privacy policy sets out precisely which providers process what in order to make the app work.

No. Conversa had a flashcard system and it was removed on purpose. Vocabulary apps are a solved and crowded problem — Anki exists, and it is free and better at it than a side feature in a conversation app was ever going to be.

What was not solved was getting a nervous learner to speak European Portuguese out loud, so that is what the app does instead.

None of it. No streak to break, no points, no leagues, no daily goal, no notifications telling you a cartoon animal is disappointed in you.

Streaks are very good at producing daily app opens and much less good at producing people who can speak the language. Since Conversa is not funded by your attention, it has no reason to want the former at the expense of the latter.

No. There is no content library to import into — no podcast player, no video transcripts, no reader, no sentence mining. Conversa is a conversation partner rather than a study platform, and there are good tools for the study-platform half that it does not try to compete with.

No structured grammar course and no fill-in-the-blank drills. Grammar shows up in the corrections and in the end-of-conversation feedback, in the context of something you were actually trying to say — which is where it tends to stick.

Start by ending the conversation and beginning a new one — the transcript is saved, so you lose nothing. If it persists, check your internet connection, then force-quit and reopen the app.

If it still happens, email me with what you tapped, what you expected and what happened instead, and roughly when. That last detail matters more than it sounds.

Conversa needs microphone permission. Open iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone and make sure Conversa is switched on. If it is not listed at all, reinstalling the app will make it ask again.

Also check that nothing else is holding the mic — an active phone call or another recording app will block it.

That is the on-device fallback voice, which the app uses when it cannot reach the speech service — almost always a connection problem. Check your internet and try again, and the proper pt-PT voices should come back.

Email peterjduffy@gmail.com. Conversa is built by one person, so you will be talking to the person who can actually fix it. Include what you tapped, what you expected and what happened instead — and if it is a Portuguese accuracy problem, the exact sentence, which is the most useful bug report I can get.