Étape 01
Say it out loud.
Read a French phrase out loud — the way you'd actually say it to a friend. No multiple choice, no fill-in-the-blank. Just your voice, into the microphone.
Bonjour · An Accent Coach for French
Sound Parisian in 10 minutes per day.
An accent coach that listens to your French, hears every sound you miss, and tells you exactly how to fix it.
2,000+ hours of phonetics research · 14 model versions · trained on 1,000+ native Parisians
Comment ça marche · How it works
You can't fix what you can't hear. Parlez hears it for you.
Étape 02
Every sound, scored.
Our model evaluates each phoneme individually — the rounded /y/ in une, the nasal /ɛ̃/ in un — against how real Parisians actually say them.
Étape 03
Coaching, not criticism.
You get a specific fix for every sound you miss: "Say 'ee' but round your lips tight like 'oo'." Mouth mechanics, grounded in phonetics — not vague encouragement.
Notre philosophie · Our philosophy
Your accent isn't fixed. And "French" isn't one accent.
01 · The belief
Adults can drop their accent.
The oldest lie in language learning is that your accent is locked in after childhood. It isn't. You've just never had a device that hears the specific sound you missed, names it, and tells you exactly how to move your mouth to fix it. That's what Parlez is. Weeks, not years.
02 · The accent
Correct French is Parisian French.
French speakers have strong opinions about accents, and so do we. The goal of Parlez is to help you sound like you belong in Paris specifically. That means our technology was trained to avoid accent features characteristic of Quebec, Marseille, Belgium, and other places with significant regional variation.
03 · The feedback
Phonetics, not platitudes.
When you miss a sound, Parlez tells you exactly what to do with your mouth — tongue position, lip shape, jaw tension — grounded in articulatory phonetics, not generic "nice try!" encouragement.
04 · The proof
Try the model before you download.
We're confident enough in the model that we put it on the web, free. Record one phrase at getparlez.com/try and hear what Paris hears — no signup, no download.
Le modèle · The model
Built to hear what other models were built to ignore.
01 · The problem
A chatbot can't coach your accent.
The general-purpose speech models — Siri, Whisper, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, every voice assistant you've ever used — are trained with one goal: understand anyone, regardless of accent. Their entire job is to normalize accent away. Ask one how your French sounds and the honest answer is it can't tell. That's the right design for dictation. It's a dealbreaker for coaching.
02 · What we built
A model that does the opposite.
Parlez runs a purpose-built speech model trained from the ground up to do what the others can't: discriminate Parisian from non-Parisian pronunciation, phoneme by phoneme, against a corpus of real native speakers. Thousands of hours of computational linguistics research, dozens of training rounds, one very specific job — tell you which sound you missed, and how to fix it.
Phonème par phonème · How phoneme scoring works
We score the unit of sound, not the word.
01 · The unit
A phoneme is a sound that changes meaning.
In English, /p/ and /b/ are phonemes — "pat" and "bat" are different words. In French, /y/ (the vowel in "tu") and /u/ (the vowel in "tout") are phonemes too — confuse them and you've said "all" instead of "you." That gap between two sounds, one of them right, is what most accent feedback misses entirely.
02 · The unit, scored
Word-level scoring tells you nothing.
If a Parisian thinks you said "tout" when you meant "tu," you don't need a 0/100. You need to know which sound went wrong, why, and exactly how to fix it. Parlez aligns your audio to the phoneme sequence the phrase is supposed to produce, then judges each individual sound the way an average Parisian ear would — a deep neural network we trained from scratch on native Parisian speech is the listener, attentive to the gap between your /y/ and theirs.
03 · The output
Mouth mechanics, not vibes.
Instead of "your accent is 7/10," you get "your /y/ in tu scored 30% — round your lips tight, like for 'oo,' but keep your tongue where it was for 'ee.'" Specific muscles, specific positions, grounded in articulatory phonetics. The kind of feedback a one-on-one coach with a phonetics PhD would give you, in seconds, every day.
04 · The check
Every coaching tip, vetted.
The model's coaching prose — every "round your lips tight," every "tongue stays flat," every example word — was reviewed by our resident native Parisian linguist before shipping. If a tip would produce the wrong sound, it doesn't go in. Try a phrase and you'll hear the result.
Questions fréquentes · About Parlez
About the Parlez accent coach.
- How does Parlez work?
- Parlez listens to you read a French phrase out loud, then judges your accent the way an average Parisian would — sound by sound. Under the hood is a deep neural network we trained from scratch on native Parisian speech: same family of model behind modern voice assistants and voice cloning, pointed at the opposite job. The result is a per-sound verdict that lines up with what a Parisian ear actually hears, plus specific mouth-mechanics coaching wherever you missed: "round your lips tight like for 'oo,' but keep your tongue where it was for 'ee.'" Two minutes a day, sound by sound. Try a phrase and you'll see the loop.
- Is Parlez worth it?
- Honest answer: it depends on whether you actually want to drop your accent. If you're learning French casually and "people understand me, that's enough," there are cheaper apps. If you're moving to Paris, doing business with French speakers, or have a French partner whose family politely tolerates your accent at dinner — Parlez is built specifically for that case. The free daily test lets you see what the model hears in your French before you commit to anything: that's the cheapest possible "is this for me" check. If the score surprises you (good or bad), the in-app version closes the gap with daily targeted training.
- How is Parlez different from Duolingo, Pimsleur, or Babbel?
- Different problem entirely. Duolingo, Pimsleur, and Babbel teach French — vocabulary, grammar, conversation. Their voice features (where they exist) use general-purpose speech recognition, which is built to ignore accent and understand anyone. Parlez doesn't teach French; it assumes you're already learning it somewhere else, and focuses on the one thing those apps can't do well: tell you how Parisian your pronunciation actually sounds, sound by sound. We use a custom phonetic discriminator, not a recognizer. It's a complement to the apps above, not a replacement — and it works well alongside any of them. Try a phrase and the difference is audible in 30 seconds.
- Does Parlez work for Quebec French or Canadian French?
- No, deliberately. Parlez is trained exclusively on native Parisian speakers and is calibrated to flag features characteristic of Quebec, Acadian, Marseille, Belgian, Swiss, and other regional varieties — even though those are perfectly correct French. The reason is that "correct French" isn't one accent, and our users are aiming for one in particular. If you're learning to sound Québécois, Parlez will score your French as worse the more Québécois you sound, because to a Parisian's ear, that's how it lands. We considered shipping a Québécois mode and may eventually, but the model's whole value is its specificity — a generalist scorer would lose what makes Parlez useful in the first place.
- What devices does Parlez support?
- Parlez runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac (M1 chip or later) — anywhere with iOS 15, iPadOS 15, or macOS 12 and up. There's no Android version today, and no immediate plans for one; the model was the hard part, the platform port is much smaller, and we wanted to ship it on one platform first and get it right. If you're on Android or a non-Apple-silicon desktop, the free in-browser accent test at frenchaccenttest.com runs the same scoring engine — just without the daily training, mouth-mechanics walkthroughs, and progress tracking that live inside the app.
- How much does Parlez cost?
- Parlez is freemium on the App Store: the app itself is free to download, and the daily training, mouth-mechanics coaching, and progress tracking live behind a subscription. Current pricing is $9.99/month or $79.99/year — we may adjust these from time to time, so the App Store listing is always the authoritative source. Apple handles billing through standard iOS subscriptions, which means we never see your card details. The free in-browser accent test at frenchaccenttest.com is the way to hear what the model says about your French before deciding anything — same scoring engine, no signup.
- Can I try Parlez before paying?
- Yes. Both the monthly and annual plans come with a free trial through Apple, so you can run the full daily training and coaching loop before being charged a cent — and you can cancel from iOS Settings any time before the trial converts. The app itself is also free to download. If you'd rather hear what the model thinks of your French before installing anything at all, the free in-browser accent test at frenchaccenttest.com runs the exact same scoring engine, gives you a sound-by-sound breakdown of one phrase, and takes about 30 seconds. If the model hears your French the way you'd want a coach to, the in-app version is the same engine plus the training loop.
- Is Parlez good for beginners or advanced learners?
- Both, but for different reasons. If you're a beginner, Parlez teaches you to hear the difference between sounds your ear hasn't yet learned to distinguish — the gap between /y/ and /u/, the three nasals, the vowels English doesn't have. If you're advanced, Parlez closes the last 15% — the sounds Parisians flag in someone who otherwise speaks fluently. Where it's not a great fit: total beginners who can't yet read a French sentence out loud. Get to that point first (other apps are good at it) and Parlez takes over from there. Try the test at your current level and you'll see which bucket you're in.
Built with soin.
Parlez is a Toggle Media app — software with soul, made to be as beautiful and careful as the thing it's teaching you to love.