Common questions

Yes. Sign in with your email and practice in your browser. No card is needed. A new account starts with free credits. They are a one-off pool, not a daily refill. To get more, invite a friend to learn with you: every friend who signs up earns you 400 more, with no limit.

Your audio is streamed to Microsoft Azure Speech to compute the score, then discarded. Tono does not keep recordings and does not use them for training. Full detail on the Privacy page.

Six books of short lessons, one for each level from A1 (beginner) to C2 (proficient). Each lesson is a short scene split into lines: you read it, tap a word to see what it means, read the grammar note, and say every line to have it scored. Open Courses in the app to start at your level.

Yes, but it only takes an email address. Enter your email, type the 6-digit code we send you, and start speaking. There is no password. Your credits stay with your email, so you keep them when you sign in on another browser or phone.

Azure Speech pronunciation assessment scores every word and every phoneme against a native model — not just the sentence as a whole. For English (US) you also get fluency, completeness and prosody. Turkish is the exception: our own model compares each sound with the target reading and gives a similarity score.

34, and every one is scored with a model built for that language rather than an English approximation — that is why accuracy holds up outside English. Turkish uses our own model: it marks the letters that came out differently, and its score is a reference rather than a verdict. The Languages page lists what each one reports.

Three causes account for most of it: background noise, speaking faster than you would to a person, and a microphone that clips. The word colors tell you which words the engine doubted — if a whole sentence comes back low, suspect the recording, not your mouth.

The International Phonetic Alphabet gives every speech sound one symbol, so /θ/ always means the sound in "think" no matter which language you are reading about. Naming the sound you missed is what makes the feedback actionable — "say it again" is not.

Yes. Type or paste any sentence into the practice page. For longer material, import it as a course and it splits into sentences you can work through line by line.

Yes. AI chat holds a conversation in the language you are learning. Tap any reply to say it out loud and have it scored, or tap a word you do not know to look it up.

Yes, in the mobile browser. The page needs a secure connection and your permission to use the microphone — both are things the browser asks for, not something you configure.

Check that the browser itself has microphone permission for this site, and that no other app is holding the microphone. If the page still cannot record, it will say so and let you listen to the native reference instead of leaving you stuck.

No. The score comes from acoustic assessment — the engine compares the sound you produced against a native model for that language. A language model never decides whether your pronunciation was good. That is why the same sentence said the same way scores the same twice.