Six weeks of daily voice chat with an AI and I still don't know if it counts

I've run both for about a year now, roughly an hour of AI voice a day and one human hour a week. The thing the machine does that a person never will is silently shrink itself to your level — it stops using tenses you fumble, it never asks you to repeat, and it never looks confused. So you get a beautifully calibrated conversation partner and zero information about whether you're actually comprehensible. My first proper conversation with a colleague from Medellín afterwards felt like a completely different language. I still use the AI daily, but I treat the human hour as the instrument that tells me the truth.

Going to push back on the top answer a little. Yes it accommodates you, but below B2 the binding constraint for most adults isn't accuracy, it's total minutes of speech ever produced. Plenty of people who've studied for three years have spoken for maybe four hours cumulatively. A partner who never judges you gets that number up by an order of magnitude, and volume fixes an embarrassing amount on its own. The correction loop you're missing is cheap: record yourself, listen back the next day, write down the three things that made you wince.

I logged it because I wanted to know the same thing. Ten weeks: 41 hours of AI voice, 14 hours with community tutors, which for Spanish ran me somewhere in the eight-to-fourteen dollars an hour range depending who I booked. The split was clean. Every correction I actually remember came from the tutor hours — a tutor stops you, makes you say it again, and the embarrassment welds it in. The AI hours gave me speed and the ability to keep talking through a hole in my vocabulary, which is not nothing and is very hard to buy at 6am.

Machine for reps, human for reality. Book one 30-minute human conversation a month and treat it as a test, not a lesson. If the test goes fine, keep doing exactly what you're doing.

I did the text version of this for three months and it was a partial waste. My reading and writing genuinely improved — I could produce decent paragraphs. My speaking did not move a millimetre. Typing gives you unlimited time to retrieve a word, and retrieval under time pressure is the entire skill you're trying to build. You've already avoided my mistake by using voice; just don't let yourself type the hard turns.