Why speaking English matters more in the age of AI.

A new question

Here’s a question many English learners are asking now: “If AI can do my English for me, why should I learn it?”

It’s a fair question. A few years ago, writing a good email in English took a long time. Now an AI app writes it in five seconds. It can fix your grammar, translate a document and explain a word in your own language.

So, okay, writing in English is getting easier for everyone. But that is exactly why speaking is getting more important. Let me explain.

1. AI can write for you. It can’t speak for you.

Think about the moments when English really matters in your life:

• a job interview
• a meeting where you need to explain your idea
• a visit to the doctor’s
• meeting your partner’s family
• a phone call when something has gone wrong

In all of these, there is no time to type. Someone is looking at you, and they are waiting for an answer. You need the words in your mouth, not on a screen.

Translation apps can help in a shop or a taxi. But a real conversation is fast. People interrupt, laugh, change the subject and ask, “What do you mean?” A delay of two or three seconds changes the whole feeling of a conversation. I wrote more about this in Will AI translation replace learning English?

2. When everyone writes perfectly, your voice is what people remember

Here’s something interesting. AI is making written English look the same. The same polite phrases. The same tidy paragraphs. When every email is perfect, a perfect email doesn’t stand out any more.

But your voice is yours. When you speak, people hear how you think. They hear if you are calm, friendly, honest and clear. That is often where people decide if they trust you, and if they want to work with you.

And you don’t need a perfect accent for this. You need to be clear. A clear speaker with an accent is easy to listen to. A very fast speaker with “perfect” grammar and no pauses is not.

Clear is more important than perfect.

3. Employers are asking for human skills

For its Future of Jobs Report 2025, the World Economic Forum asked more than 1,000 large companies which skills they need. One of the top three core skills was something it calls “leadership and social influence”.

That’s a big name for some simple things: explaining your ideas, listening to people, and helping a group agree. And you do most of that by talking.

The same report says that skills in AI and big data are growing the fastest. So the future isn’t “AI skills or people skills”. It’s both. People who can use AI and explain things clearly to other people will do very well.

4. We talk to machines now, too

Something new is happening. More and more, we speak to computers. We ask our phones for directions. We talk to a voice assistant in the kitchen. Many AI apps now have a voice button, so you can have a whole conversation out loud. Some companies even use one-way video interviews: you record your answers to a camera, and someone (or something) watches them later.

All of this works better when you speak clearly. Not with a “perfect” British or American accent. Just clearly: the stress in the right place, the ends of words not swallowed, a short pause between ideas.

The good news is that computers understand accents much better than they did a few years ago. In one 2025 test with non-native speakers reading aloud, the best systems got about 95 words in every 100 right. But they still make more mistakes with noise, with fast, unplanned speech, and with some accents. Speaking clearly helps the machine, and it helps people even more.

5. The best news: AI is a wonderful speaking partner

Now for the part I’m really excited about. For most English learners, the hardest thing was never grammar. It was finding someone to speak with. Someone patient. Someone who is free at eleven o’clock at night. Someone who won’t laugh at you.

Now you have that, for free, on your phone.

Researchers have started to study this. In one study from Turkey, published in January 2026, 48 university students took two speaking tests: one with an AI, and one with a person. They felt less nervous with the AI. Their scores were about the same. And most of the students said they still preferred the person, because the person felt more caring.

I think that study tells the whole story. AI takes away some of the fear. That really matters, because fear stops more people speaking English than anything else. But people still want people.

AI also has limits, and I want to be honest about them:

• It is very polite. Real people are not always polite.
• It often understands you even when your pronunciation is wrong, because it guesses from the other words. A busy person in a noisy café may not.
• It doesn’t react like a person. It won’t look bored, laugh at your joke or look confused.

So here is my advice:

Use AI to practise. Use people to live.

Practise with AI every day. Then take what you learned into real conversations with real people.

What to do this week

1. Speak out loud for ten minutes a day. Use the voice mode in an AI app, or just talk to yourself. I wrote a step-by-step guide: How to practise speaking English with AI.
2. Learn phrases, not just words. Native speakers talk in ready-made pieces: “to be honest”, “that makes sense”, “I’m not sure yet”. Learn the whole piece, and say it out loud.
3. Have one real conversation in English every week. A colleague, a neighbour, an online class. A small, real conversation is worth more than a perfect one in your head.

My last word

AI will change how we write. I don’t think it will change why we talk. We talk to be understood, to be liked and to be trusted. That has always been a human thing, and I think it will stay one.

Take care, and keep speaking.
James