AI SPEAKING COACH · 10 MINUTES A DAY
Become the best communicator on your team.
Retake hears every “um”, times every pause and tells you the one thing to fix. Then you say it again — until you sound like the person you want to be.
FREE · NO SIGNUP · RESULTS IN ~10 SECONDS
The best communicators get the raise.
“The one easy way to become worth 50 percent more than you are now — at least — is to hone your communication skills — both written and verbal.”
26%
Senior executives say executive presence accounts for 26% of what it takes to get the next promotion.
Center for Talent Innovation, 2012Heard > read
Recruiters rated candidates more competent and intelligent, and wanted to hire them more, when they heard the pitch instead of reading it.
Schroeder & Epley, Psychological Science, 201512 / min
At 12 filler sounds a minute, listeners rated speakers significantly less effective. Five or fewer did no harm.
Laske & DiGennaro Reed, J. Applied Behavior Analysis, 2024You've never heard yourself the way your audience does.
You talk in the order you think.
Context, caveats, then — finally — the point. Your listener needed it the other way round, and drifted off somewhere around the second caveat.
Your fillers are invisible to you.
Everyone else counts them. Almost nobody can hear their own, which is why reading tips about them never works.
Practice without feedback is just repetition.
Rehearsing in the shower feels productive. Without someone telling you what changed, you mostly rehearse your habits.
Small words, big signal.
“Sorry to bother you, but…”
“Got two minutes? I need your call on the launch date.”
Apologising for asking shrinks the ask before you've made it.
Say it out loud — meetings drill →“I think maybe we could…”
“I recommend we ship Friday. Two reasons.”
Hedges invite people to discount your idea; a recommendation with reasons invites a decision.
Say it out loud — leadership drill →“Does that make sense?”
“What questions do you have?”
The first suggests you explained it badly; the second assumes they were listening.
Say it out loud — presentations drill →“That's a great question.”
(pause for two seconds) — then answer.
The filler compliment sounds scripted; a pause buys the same thinking time and sounds considered.
Say it out loud — interviews drill →“So, um, basically what I do is…”
“I help new customers get set up in a day instead of a week.”
Lead with the outcome you create, not the warm-up.
Say it out loud — everyday confidence drill →“I just wanted to quickly check…”
“Quick check: is the demo still on for Thursday?”
“Just” and “quickly” pre-apologise; the question alone is enough.
Say it out loud — meetings drill →What do you need to nail?
InterviewsRehearse out loud, get grilled on follow-ups, and hear exactly which answers would cost you the offer.
MeetingsBe the person whose thirty seconds everyone remembers — not the one people wait to finish.PresentationsRehearse the opening until it lands. Retake hears the monotone, the rush and the missing pause before your audience does.
Pitching & salesMost pitches end on a feature list. Rehearse until yours ends on a clear, specific ask.
LeadershipHard feedback, the board update, the question you hoped nobody would ask — rehearse them before they happen.Everyday confidenceTen minutes a day to swap fillers for pauses and hedges for conviction — measured, not guessed.Record. Get marked up. Retake. Nail it.
Record a take
30–90 seconds, audio or video, on a prompt from today's lesson — or tomorrow's real pitch.
Get marked up
Your transcript comes back like an editor's script: fillers highlighted, hedges flagged, pace, pauses and pitch measured.
One thing to fix
Not twelve tips. The single change that will most improve the next take — often with the exact words to say.
Retake it
Say it again. Watch the numbers move. You move on when you've nailed the drill — not when you've read about it.
So um, I think I'd bring, like, a lot of different things? I've worked on a lot of projects and I'm kind of a fast learner, and you know, I just really care about the work, basically…
Because I've already solved the problem you're hiring for. [pause] At Fieldwork I cut onboarding time from six weeks to three, by rebuilding it around the first customer win. [pause] Your job post says onboarding is the bottleneck. That's the work I want to do here.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE OF THE RETAKE LOOP
One idea a day. Practised until it's yours.
Each day is a two-minute lesson grounded in the research on how people actually listen, then two or three short recorded drills with a clear target. About ten minutes.
Delivery
- 01Trade “um” for silence
- 02Speak at the speed of meaning
- 03The power pause
- 04Escape the monotone
- 05Drop the hedge
- 06Own the frame
- 07Play the full instrument
Clarity
- 08Answer first
- 09PREP: the four-beat answer
- 10The rule of three
- 11Signpost: give them the map
- 12Say it in half
- 13Explain it with an analogy
- 14The 60-second brief
Story & persuasion
- 15The one-moment story
- 16STAR without the snooze
- 17Concrete beats abstract
- 18Problem, solution, ask
- 19Handle the objection
- 20Make the clear ask
- 21The 90-second pitch
Under pressure
- 22Impromptu with a framework
- 23What? So what? Now what?
- 24Answer, bridge, communicate
- 25Answer the actual question
- 26The hostile question
- 27The hard conversation
- 28The executive update
- 29The two-minute talk
- 30The high-stakes moment
Rehearse it. Get grilled on it. Then do it for real.
Daily drills
Ten focused minutes on one skill. Push-to-talk, audio or video. A streak that makes skipping feel worse than doing it.
TARGET: STRUCTURE ≥ 75 · ≤ 3 FILLERS/MIN
TAKE 2 · ✓ NAILED
Mock interviews
An AI interviewer asks out loud, waits for you, and follows up when you're vague. Paste a real job description and it grills you on that role.
You described the project well, but never said what you decided. The question was about your judgement.
Meeting mode
Runs during your real calls. Records only you, only while you speak. Afterwards: your talk time, your longest turn, and whether your points landed.
Measured, not guessed.
Pace, pauses and pitch are measured from the audio signal itself, not guessed by a model. Then an AI coach, briefed on the craft and on today's drill, judges what you said — quoting your exact words for every point it makes.
Read the method →Fillers / min
MEASUREDum, uh, like, you know — counted and highlighted where they happen
Pace
MEASUREDwords per minute against the 130–165 sweet spot
Pauses
MEASUREDpurposeful silence vs dead air over 3 seconds
Vocal variety
MEASUREDpitch movement in semitones — the cure for monotone
Hedges
MEASURED“I think”, “kind of”, “just” — the words that shrink your claims
Clarity
COACHcould a busy listener repeat your point?
Structure
COACHanswer first, signposts, a real ending
Concision
COACHevery word earning its place
Answered the question
COACHor did you talk around it?
On-camera presence
COACHeye line, posture, expression, gestures
Skills improve fastest with short, focused attempts, immediate feedback on one thing, and another attempt right away. Psychologists call it deliberate practice. Retake is built around it.
The idea comes from Anders Ericsson's research on expert performance. Most speaking advice skips the part that matters — the feedback and the retake.
Less than one session with a speaking coach.
Start free. Upgrade when you want the whole program.
$0
Start here. No card.
- ✓ Your baseline Communicator Score
- ✓ Days 1–3 of the 30-day program
- ✓ 25 coached takes a month
- ✓ 1 full mock interview
$8.25/mo
$99 billed once a year. Try it 7 days free.
- ✓ The full 30-day program + every future track
- ✓ Unlimited coached takes and retakes
- ✓ Unlimited AI mock interviews, 8 tracks or your own job description
- ✓ Meeting mode — coaching on how you actually talk at work
- ✓ On-camera presence analysis
- ✓ Skill-by-skill progress over time
$19/mo
Everything in Pro. Cancel any time.
- ✓ Everything in yearly
- ✓ Best for a single sprint — an interview next month, a keynote next quarter
Questions
Do I need a camera?+
No. Audio-only works for everything except on-camera presence feedback. Turn the camera on for drills about presence, eye line and gestures.
Who hears my recordings?+
Nobody but you. Recordings are private to your account and used only to coach you — never to train AI models. You can download everything or delete your account in Settings at any time.
How is this different from Toastmasters or a human coach?+
Keep both if you have them. Retake gives you something neither can: unlimited reps, at 11pm before the interview, with measured feedback in seconds — and a retake loop that won't let you move on until you've actually improved. Most people practise by thinking about speaking. Retake makes you do it.
What exactly does it measure?+
From your audio: fillers per minute (um, uh, like, you know), pace in words per minute, purposeful pauses vs dead air, pitch variety, hedges and crutch words. From what you said: clarity, structure, concision, confidence, engagement, whether you answered the question — and, on video, your on-camera presence.
Does meeting mode record other people?+
It records only your microphone, and only while you're speaking — silence is discarded on your device. With headphones on, other people on the call aren't recorded at all. Use it where recording your own voice is allowed.
Which languages work?+
The coaching is built for English. It understands and replies in other languages too, but filler detection and the 30-day program are tuned for English for now.
Can I cancel?+
Yes — two clicks from Settings, no emails, no calls. The yearly plan has a 7-day free trial and you won't be charged until it ends.
Your next important conversation is already booked.
Rehearse it tonight. Sixty seconds, no signup — and you'll know exactly what to fix.
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