Speakeasy: Talk on the Spot

Two words that have nothing to do with each other, sixty seconds on the clock, and you have to say something out loud that connects them. padlock and escape. glacier and regret. ice rink and envy. Thirty seconds to find an angle, then thirty to talk while your phone listens and writes down what you said. Afterwards it shows you the things you cannot hear yourself doing: how fast you went, where you stopped long enough that a listener would have noticed, which words you reach for when you are stuck, and the whole thing written out. There is no score. A number out of ten would tell you nothing you can act on. It will not put you in front of a room. What it trains is the part where you have to think without a script, and that is usually the part that catches people out. The talk happens on the phone. The recording stays on it so you can hear a talk back, and never leaves it; there is no account to make, and two taps delete every talk you have given, audio included. Two things reach the network. The app reads a small settings file and the word packs from the same site everyone else does, with nothing about you in either. And one feature sends the text of a talk to Google, to judge whether you really did join the two words; it stays off until you switch it on. Free. Every format, every pack, every talk you keep, no daily limit.