Your companion now sends you voice notes because hearing a language is half of keeping it: the accent, the rhythm, the noise of the place behind the voice. Not all the time. She answers most of your voice notes with one of her own, now and then she sends one on her own, and when you ask how a word is pronounced, she says it for you, slowly.
Here's the longer version.
The voice note from the café
You know that voice note.
A friend who lives abroad. Or a friend from the country you used to live in.
Forty seconds. Half of it is them laughing at their own story. Behind them, a coffee machine, a chair scraping, a waiter shouting an order you almost understand.
You play it twice.
Not because you missed the words. Because it sounds like the place.
That's the part text can't give you. A message tells you what someone said. A voice note tells you how they say it: where the sentence speeds up, which syllables they swallow, the little sound they make before every answer that no textbook ever wrote down.
Your ear forgets too
I've written before that texting keeps the words reachable. I still think that. The words were the first thing I felt go with my Italian.
But there's a second thing that goes, and it goes quietly.
Your ear.
You stop hearing the language. Then one day someone talks to you at normal speed and it sounds like a wall. You know every damn word they used. You just didn't catch them going past.
And your own accent drifts. Not into anything terrible. Just a bit flatter. A bit more like your own language wearing a costume.
Texting doesn't fix that. I said so in the post on whether texting improves your speaking, and I meant it.
So, fine. If the thing I built is supposed to keep a language alive, it should probably make some noise.
What it actually is
Your companion already has a city, a job and a week of her own. Now she has a voice too.
Her accent is her home city's. The way people there talk.
And behind her voice there's a place from her day. Her flat with the TV on. A street. A café, with the coffee machine doing its thing.
She's an AI, she says so in her first message, and her voice is generated too. It just sounds like someone who lives there.
She sends a voice note in three moments.
When you send her one. Most of the time, she answers with a voice note of her own. You spoke, so she answers the same way.
Now and then, on her own. From home, from the street, from a café. Not from work, not at night, not from a plane. Real people don't send voice notes from a plane either. Well. Most of them.
When you ask how something is pronounced. Ask her how a word is pronounced, and she says it, slower and clearer than usual. Pretty useful when you've been saying it wrong for years without knowing.
Just audio
It's just audio, like a real voice note. No transcript under it. No subtitles.
That's on purpose. The whole point is your ear doing the work.
If you don't catch something, do what you'd do with a friend: ask. Type it, and she'll write it out for you.
One switch
Maybe you read your messages on the train without headphones. Maybe you just prefer to read. Fair enough.
One switch turns voice notes off for all your companions at once. It's in /help on Telegram and on your companions page. With it off, they only write, exactly like before.
What it isn't
She doesn't phone you. There's no live conversation and nothing to schedule. It's a chat, and now some of the chat is out loud.
And her voice won't fix your accent by itself. Hearing a language is half of it. Saying things out loud is the other half, so keep doing that. Send her a voice note. You'll hear yourself hesitate, which, annoyingly, is useful information.
She's also for languages you can already get by in, roughly A2 and up. If you're starting from zero, a course or a tutor first.
Parla costs 20 euro a month, 99 euro every six months, or 149 euro a year (12.42 euro a month), VAT included. The first week is free, and you don't need a card for it.
So here's my suggestion. Start the free week, send her a voice note, and see what comes back.
Worst case, you hear a coffee machine in another country.
