Mural

Mural teaches a language by making you talk. You hold spoken conversations with an AI tutor across 24 everyday settings instead of doing drills. It tracks the words you stumble on and brings them back in later sessions. All learning records stay on the phone, with no cloud sync, analytics, or ads. MIT licensed, with native iPhone and Android clients in one repo.

Getting it running is the hard part. There is no App Store or TestFlight listing. iPhone means building it yourself with Xcode 26 on a Mac for iOS 26.1 or later, and a free Apple account has to re-sign the app every seven days. Android is easier: a preview APK for Android 8 or later. Either way you connect your own OpenAI API key with billing turned on. A ChatGPT subscription does not count.

Solo learners comfortable with Xcode or sideloading: free, plus whatever OpenAI charges you. It covers eight languages, including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin, and Norwegian. Everyone else should wait for the hosted version the project is planning, which is not active yet.

The catch: your OpenAI bill is open-ended. The README says the conversation time limit is not a billing cap. The project also admits fluent-speaker review is still needed before it makes any claim about pronunciation or learning results. It is a practice partner, not a course.