Free PTE pronunciation checker: an AI speaking analyser

A pronunciation checker is a tool that records your spoken answer, runs speech-to-text plus acoustic analysis, and returns a per-word confidence score. Ours mirrors the two AI-only speaking traits Pearson uses: oral fluency and pronunciation. You get a score band, the exact words that sounded unclear, and the pause markers where your rhythm broke.

Every spoken answer in PTE Academic is scored on up to three traits: content, oral fluency and pronunciation. Pronunciation and oral fluency are AI-scored on every speaking task, always, with no human review. Content is AI-scored and then reviewed by a human examiner on the more open tasks. That is why matching Pearson's automated marker matters more than sounding good to a human coach.

No. Pearson explicitly accepts any regional accent that is intelligible to an international English listener. What lowers the pronunciation trait is missed word stress, dropped endings ('understandin' instead of 'understanding'), swallowed vowels, and sounds that could plausibly be mistaken for another word. An Indian, Nigerian, Filipino, or Australian accent scores the same as a British one when the sounds land clearly.

Pronunciation is about the sounds themselves: whether an 'e' sounds like an 'e', whether the stress lands on the right syllable, whether the ending consonant is audible. Oral fluency is about the timing between the sounds: whether your pace is even, whether you pause naturally or awkwardly, whether you restart. You can have great pronunciation and poor fluency (a slow, choppy reader) or great fluency and poor pronunciation (a smooth speaker who mumbles endings). Both traits are scored on every speaking task.

The scoring engine used by Pearson is a large speech model trained on thousands of test-taker recordings, and independent Pearson research shows very high agreement with expert human raters on both fluency and pronunciation. Our checker uses a comparable automatic speech recognition model, which means the words it fails to recognise are almost always the words a real PTE marker would flag as unclear. It is a signal, not the exact final score, but it is a useful signal.

For Superior English the whole speaking skill must reach 88, which in practice means both oral fluency and pronunciation need to be at trait band 5. A trait band of 3 caps your overall speaking around 65, and a trait band of 4 sits in the Proficient range. There is no way to hit Superior speaking with a pronunciation trait of 3, even if your content is perfect.

Three drills work faster than anything else: shadow one minute of clear English audio every day (match the speaker's stress and rhythm word for word), record every Read Aloud attempt and listen back for dropped endings, and practise Repeat Sentence with the tone off so you build the reflex to speak immediately after the audio stops. Two focused weeks lifts most candidates one trait band.

Every speaking task feeds the pronunciation trait: Read Aloud, Repeat Sentence, Describe Image, Retell Lecture, Summarize Group Discussion and Respond to a Situation. Answer Short Question also involves speaking but since August 2025 it is scored under listening, not speaking. If you want the fastest pronunciation practice loop, Read Aloud and Repeat Sentence give the most reps for the least prep time.