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HOW THE AI ACTUALLY GRADES YOU
No magic. Just the same rubric Cambridge uses.
Angie sounds friendly, but underneath she runs the exact four-criteria IELTS Speaking rubric your examiner will use on test day. Here's the whole pipeline, end to end.
THE RUBRIC
Four criteria. Same as the real test.
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Fluency & coherence — how smoothly you connect ideas. Penalises long pauses, fillers, and stop-start delivery.
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Lexical resource — vocabulary breadth, accuracy, idiom. We track novel words used and flag repeated ones.
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Grammatical range & accuracy — sentence variety + error count. Subjunctives and conditionals score higher than past simple.
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Pronunciation — not 'British accent', but intelligibility. Audio is checked against a CMU phoneme map.
THE PIPELINE
From microphone to feedback in 5 seconds.
1. Audio capture (browser-side)
MediaRecorder API, 16kHz mono, WebM on Chrome/Firefox, MP4 on Safari/iOS. Audio is chunked and sent over multipart/form-data so the proxy doesn't choke on large files.
2. Transcription (OpenAI Whisper)
Whisper-1 transcribes your speech. We pre-warm the connection so the round-trip is sub-1.5s for short clips.
3. Two-lane grading (GPT-4o)
Lane A (fast) returns Angie's spoken reply in <3 seconds. Lane B (background, 8–9 s) runs the full Cambridge rubric and patches your bands + corrections into the chat afterwards. You never see a loading spinner.
4. Audit & feedback loop
1% of grading is sampled weekly and re-graded by Cambridge ESOL-trained linguists. We re-tune the system prompt monthly to keep AI bands aligned within ±0.25 of human bands.
WHAT WE DON'T DO
And here's what we refuse.
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No accent prejudice. We score intelligibility, not 'Britishness'. A South African or Indian accent scores the same as RP.
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No audio retention beyond the session. Transcript only.
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No third-party voice cloning, no training on user data.
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No hidden 'engagement' boosters. Your band score doesn't get inflated to keep you subscribed.
Stop reading. Start speaking.
Free, every day. No card required.
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