Updated
You made friends on HelloTalk. You didn't get fluent.
Texting is not speaking. They are different skills. Here's an app for the speaking part.
Cambiyo launches 1 July 2026. Free waitlist. No card.
You have had HelloTalk on your phone for over a year. You log in most days. You have made some good friends. There is a guy in São Paulo who corrects your messages so kindly that you actually look forward to it.
Your spoken English is barely better than when you started.
That is the hard part to admit. You did the thing. You showed up. You posted on Moments. You replied to corrections. You sent voice messages now and then. And somehow, twelve months in, the moment someone calls you on the phone in English, you still freeze for the first thirty seconds.
It is not your fault. HelloTalk is built for typing, not for talking.
The Moments wall, the corrections, the partners, the audio rooms all work in their own way. But the main thing you do on HelloTalk is type. And typing in a foreign language is a different skill from speaking it. You can be very good at one and still freeze on the other. Plenty of HelloTalk users are.
The app also pulls you toward the easier skill. Voice calls feel scary. Typing feels safe. So you type. You correct. You scroll. You feel like you're doing something. The hours add up. The speaking does not.
There is the other thing nobody quite says out loud. The community side of HelloTalk is also where some users come to flirt, to date, to slide into your messages. You learn to spot it. You block, you report, you carry on. But it costs energy that should be going into practice.
Maybe you tried Tandem too. Same idea, slightly different look, same drift into messages and DMs. Maybe you tried Preply or italki. You booked a tutor, paid for an hour, got a structured class when what you wanted was a chat. Maybe ChatGPT. It was patient and always there. After a few weeks you started to wonder if "feeling productive" and "actually getting fluent" were the same thing. They are not.
The apps you have are not bad. They are built for the wrong job.
You don't need another social feed. You don't need a tutor. You need a real person, online right now, who will speak English with you for as long as you have, and who isn't going to slide into your DMs.
That is what we are building.
What we’re building
Cambiyo
You open the app. You see who is online. You filter by accent: English, American, Scottish, Australian, Irish. You see ratings, prices, profiles. You pick someone. You start talking.
Speakers set their own prices, starting from $5 an hour. You pay only for the time you spend talking. No subscription. No booking.
Every speaker is checked before they can go live. They send a short video selfie. We check their face, accent, and country. If something is fake, they don't get on the platform. If they behave badly later, they get a warning, then removed.
They are not tutors. They are real people: students, freelancers, retirees, anyone fluent in English who wants to earn from a conversation. They show up because they are being paid, and they keep showing up because their rating depends on it.
It is the opposite of a social feed. There is no profile to scroll, no Moments wall, no DMs to manage. One thing happens: you talk.
What practice looks like
It's 6.30am. You make coffee. You have a quiet 30 minutes before the rest of the house wakes up. You open Cambiyo. Sarah is online. You spend 25 minutes talking about a film you watched. The day starts in English.
It's lunch. You eat at your desk, you have an hour. Jake is online. You spend 40 minutes talking about your job. You go back to work having actually used your English instead of scrolling through corrections.
It's the night before a presentation in English at work. You don't need a lesson. You need to say it out loud, in real time, to someone who will tell you when you are not clear. Claire is online. Forty-five minutes later you have cleaned up the parts you were dreading.
The presentation goes differently. The next call doesn't catch you off guard. The fluency you thought was stuck starts moving again.
You stop being held back by something you can fix.