Shadow Talk

Shadow Talk — YouTube Speaking Practice

Practice speaking by shadowing YouTube videos. Pause after each sentence, repeat it, get scored. Free, open source, no account needed.

Shadow Talk turns any YouTube video into a speaking practice tool using the proven "shadowing" technique.

HOW IT WORKS
1. Open any YouTube video with captions
2. Click the Shadow Talk icon and choose your language
3. The video plays normally until the end of a sentence
4. The video pauses — now it's your turn to repeat the sentence
5. Shadow Talk listens to your speech and scores your accuracy
6. See a word-by-word comparison: green for correct, red for missed
7. Click Continue to move to the next sentence, or Replay to try again

WHY SHADOWING WORKS
Shadowing is a language learning method used by interpreters and polyglots worldwide. By mimicking native speakers sentence-by-sentence, you train:
- Pronunciation and accent
- Speaking rhythm and intonation
- Vocabulary in real context
- Listening comprehension

FEATURES
- Works on any YouTube video with captions (manual or auto-generated)
- Real-time speech recognition powered by your browser (no data sent to servers)
- Word-level scoring with visual diff (correct / close match / missed)
- Live preview of what you're saying as you speak
- Replay, retry, and skip controls
- 20 languages supported including English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Persian, and more
- Dark-themed overlay that doesn't block the video
- Progress bar tracking your session
- Average score summary at the end

PRIVACY
- No account required — install and start practicing immediately
- No data leaves your browser — speech recognition runs locally via the Web Speech API
- No external APIs, no tracking, no analytics
- Your scores are never uploaded anywhere
- Open source: inspect every line of code yourself

SUPPORTED LANGUAGES
English (US/UK), Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (BR/PT), Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified/Traditional), Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, Polish, Swedish, Persian (Farsi)

TIPS FOR BEST RESULTS
- Use videos with clear speech (interviews, TED talks, language lessons)
- Start with slower-paced videos and work your way up
- Use the Replay button to hear difficult sentences again
- Don't worry about perfect scores — 70-80% is great for practice

OPEN SOURCE
Shadow Talk is 100% free and open source. No subscriptions, no premium tiers, no ads.

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language learning, speaking practice, shadowing, pronunciation, YouTube, speech recognition