Can Pingo AI truly replace a human Chinese tutor? I put it to the test

Who needs a human language tutor anymore? Pingo AI claims to have everything you need to learn Chinese. But does it really? I spent a week testing Pingo AI to find out whether an AI language tutor could actually improve my Chinese speaking skills. By the end of the experiment, I wasn’t convinced.

Key features of the Pingo AI language tutor app

Pingo AI is an AI-powered speaking tutor designed for conversation practice rather than written input. You talk to it in your target language, and it responds, adapts to your level, corrects you, and remembers your progress. It was launched in January 2025 by San Francisco-based Pingo AI, Inc. and it offers 25+ languages, including Chinese. In a nutshell:

• AI-powered conversation practice: train speaking skills with an AI tutor.
• Personalized learning: builds your own learning plan around your language level and goals.
• Goal-focused practice: practice travel, work, everyday situations, interviews, etc.
• Corrections & feedback: get help with pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and mistakes.
• Progress & memory: keeps track of what you’ve learned and your recurring mistakes.
• Anytime/anywhere: designed primarily as an on-demand tutor and speaking partner.

My expectations from Pingo

Before we start, let’s just pin down my expectations. I expect an AI language tutor to be the digital equivalent of a real-life language tutor. Ideally, I wouldn’t need to book one-on-one lessons any more. Instead, I could simply practice anytime, anywhere I want, using the app on my phone. Basically, Pingo should be able to do everything a human tutor can: such as practicing conversation, correcting me, and brushing up my vocabulary and grammar.

Are these dangerously high expectations? Perhaps, but that is precisely the marketing message on Pingo’s language-specific landing pages:

Positive surprises

Let’s jump into it. The initial steps work well. Once you’ve shared your current language level and learning goals, your lesson package is prepared immediately. Keep in mind that this initial input regarding exactly what you want to learn forms the foundation of your study plan, so the more specific your instructions, the better. I tried out several things:

• work-related topics in Chinese, specifically, my daily work as an SEO/content manager
• holding fluent conversations with Dutch friends (Dutch)
• discussing quantum physics with professors (German)
• the absolute basics (Norwegian)

A learning path is created based on your expressed learning goals. This is something you can adjust later, so no need to worry if you don’t get it straight from the start. In my case, it initially focused a bit too much on electrical engineering and not enough on SEO, but that was a quick fix.

I was pleasantly surprised you can do lesson-based vocabulary practice. That’s a feature I’ve missed with other AI tutors where you have freestyle conversation, but no way to directly review vocabulary items afterwards. Precisely because so much happens during a lesson, it’s essential to be able to calmly review what was covered, both via flashcards in the “quick review” and through “listen and repeat” speaking exercises. This helps you get more out of your lessons.

My Chinese study plan seemed sound as well. It aligned with my input and was a good match for what I had in mind.

Disappointments

Now, let’s move on to the aspects I didn’t like quite as much.

The minimalist interface

To start with a minor point: the interface takes some getting used to because of its minimalist design. I miss having a central overview that shows me where I am and where to find the main screens one expects from an app like this. Admittedly, this may partly be a matter of taste and familiarity, but finding my way around in Pingo was certainly a source of some frustration.

Pingo’s idea of a language lesson

But let’s talk about the actual lessons. They are short and digestible, which is a good thing, as no one really wants hour-long sessions.

The lessons are structured around just four or five short sentences, depending on your level and goals. For beginners, a mix of the target language and ones primary language is used. This is fine in itself, although – in my opinion – the true art for language teachers lies in teaching entirely in the target language right from the start. At higher levels, only the target language is used.

For me, the sentences actually aligned well with my objectives: they covered SEO for online stores, as well as writing product titles and descriptions. Since these are among my daily tasks, I found that surprisingly plausible.

However, I did find the sentences to be unnaturally technical, containing a high information density and complex terms. And this is where it gets interesting. Any good Chinese teacher would sense the student’s level and take a step back to go through those words one by one. Pingo doesn’t do that. That resulted in me failing to reproduce the sentence correctly. After two or three times, it would simply say, “Okay, we’ll save this for later,” without any further explanation.

Limited, drill-style conversations

We also need to look at the nature of the interaction with the AI tutor. I experienced Pingo as a tutor that prompts you to reproduce short phrases, essentially a “repeat-after-me” exercise, embedded in a simulated conversation that you have little to no control over. Consequently, it feels more like a drill. If you read the phrase correctly, you succeed; if you get it wrong, you have to try again.

Better no stuttering or hesitation when speaking

I found it frustrating that you cannot practice before sending the recording – or at least, that doesn’t seem to be a standard setting. The microphone is constantly on, picking up everything. Furthermore, if you hesitate even slightly, the recording cuts off immediately, and Pingo “penalizes” you for the incomplete sentence That annoyed me. Maybe that’s why the “friendly, warm voice” from the default settings struck me as authoritarian at times when not meeting demands.

Furthermore, the level of the instructional language, how the teacher speaks to you during the lesson, is unnecessarily complex. I tested this across multiple languages ​​and proficiency levels. A certain degree of simplification takes place, when you switch levels, but it is nowhere near as adaptive as it should be.

Last but not least, the Dutch “how have you been” disaster

Like I mentioned, Dutch was one of the languages ​​I tested. As a native speaker, I wanted to put myself in a beginner’s shoes for a moment, pretending to be an expat wanting to chat with Dutch friends. Pingo therefore suggested opening the conversation with the Dutch equivalent of “how have you been?” A great idea, except that our advanced AI got it completely wrong. Because it actually tried to convince me that you could open a conversation in Dutch with “hoe is het met je geweest?” Sorry, Pingo, but that’s incorrect, it sounds as if you were asking about how someone has been in a very specific period in someone’s past. But above all, that’s just not how you say it in Dutch.

Another interesting detail: when I pointed out to Pingo that no Dutch person would ever use that phrase to start a conversation, Pingo confidently replied, “I can assure you that this is correct. Now repeat after me: ‘hoe is het met je geweest?'”.

And that brings me full circle. Because if AI stumbles on such basics, what else might be going wrong? Isn’t our confidence in AI’s teaching abilities far too high? Just imagine if a human teacher made a blunder like that in the very first lesson, it would immediately be his or her last.

Is it because Dutch is a “small language” compared to English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Hindi etc.? So when it comes to real life usage, AI isn’t quite on the same level? I don’t know, although I have noticed that the quality of ChatGPT’s Dutch language output actually has increased a lot since it was first launched. That’s why I didn’t see this coming.

How useful is Pingo for beginners, intermediate and advanced learners?

With previous AI apps I reviewed, my conclusion always came down to: interesting for intermediate and advanced users, but unsuitable for beginners due to AI’s inability to ‘simple down’. This time, however, Pingo seems to have succeeded in designing an app that is actually suitable for beginners. Pingo keeps things accessible by using English for instructions and avoiding overwhelming the user with too many complex elements at once.

Yet, this time actually the advanced lesson content raised doubts for me. Once again, I found the phrases to be repeated very complex, and the instructional language offered little guidance. Here I needed Pingo to adjust to my pace to make the lessons effective and avoid frustration, but instead I got more of the same.

In this regard, the AI ​​currently lacks pedagogical insight and adaptability. Pingo acts like a overly motivated tutor with robotic traits. Where a human tutor might need only a subtle hint to adjust, when seeing a student struggling, Pingo doesn’t slow down, but doggedly sticks to its program.

Learning effectiveness

How effective is learning with Pingo? It would be interesting to have 100 test learners use Pingo for an hour every day and compare them with a control group taking seven hours of Chinese lessons per week for a reasonable period of time. But as you might guess, such a study has yet to be conducted. All you have to go on are testimonials and user reviews, though these should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, especially the testimonials on the Pingo website, claiming that Pingo fastforwarded their learning unlike anything else.

So, unfortunately, there isn’t much serious to say about it other than that Pingo offers an accessible way to practice spoken Chinese on your phone. You take short lessons that build on one another and reinforce what you’ve learned – much like a serious teacher would – though there are some technical glitches and speech recognition errors you have to cope with.

Pingo vs Talkpal

Talkpal and Pingo make for a truly interesting comparison. Both are AI language tutors. To my knowledge, Talkpal has been around a bit longer and supports more languages.

Where do the differences lie? While Pingo focuses on speaking, Talkpal is more aimed at providing an AI-driven version of traditional language study. You can opt for general lessons at various levels as well as thematic lessons covering everything from nutrition and fitness to online banking, all featuring a wide variety of exercise types. In addition to these more structured learning paths, you can also practice freely – writing or speaking – depending on your preference.

In short, Talkpal offers a very comprehensive package and you can go in lots of different directions. However, what it lacks – and what Pingo offers – is that personalized approach. With Pingo, for instance, you can specify that you’ll be traveling to Sichuan, China, in two months and want to be able to order hot pot with your preferred ingredients without any hassle. Or perhaps you’re expecting a visit from Chinese colleagues whom you’ll be showing around. No matter the scenario, Pingo can cater specifically to those needs and devise a learning path that aligns closely with your goals.

The bottom line: Pingo excels at making the learning experience personal and relevant. Talkpal, meanwhile, may offer a broader range of lesson content and exercises, perhaps even more than you can meaningfully utilize (think chatting with Edgar Allan Poe or other historical figures – fun, but not essential).

Pingo vs ChatGPT

Some readers might ask why not switch to ChatGPT‘s voice mode and give the following instructions: “Act as my Mandarin tutor. Speak only Mandarin, correct my grammar after each response, keep a list of my recurring mistakes, and gradually increase the difficulty.”

In doing so, you could create your own Mandarin AI tutor and tweak it in your own preferred direction, very much like Pingo. If you allow ChatGPT to remember conversations, you’ll soon notice that your AI tutor knows you as good your best friends (assuming you’re a regular user). And it gets even better: the whole learning experience is free of charge. So why pay for Pingo?

Just like with TalkPal, Fully Fluent that I covered earlier on this blog, the answer is ease of use. Yeah, there is nothing Pingo can do that ChatGPT doesn’t also offer. You just have to set it up (in ChatGPT) and fine-tune it yourself until you get it to the point where it works for you.

If you’re an experienced AI user and a bit of a nerd, that’s no problem. But if you don’t feel like messing around with AI, or perhaps aren’t quite sure about the goal of your interactions with the AI ​​tutor, your starting and target levels, your focus areas, and so on, then Pingo makes it very easy for you. Download the app and you can get started within two minutes, complete with a personalized learning plan and an interface that is designed to boost speaking skills in your target language.

What other learners have to say about Pingo

Pingo AI currently scores 4.6/5 on both major stores: about 193K Google Play reviews and 15K Apple App Store ratings. That’s impressive.

If you read the reviews, you’ll notice that many users particularly value the conversation practice, pronunciation feedback, and engaging AI interactions. Recurring complaints concern speech-recognition glitches, looping/technical problems, scripted conversations, and the subscription/paywall (“why can’t this be free?”).

For Mandarin specifically, feedback is more mixed: one reviewer praised it while flagging a significant “tā” (他/她) pronunciation/recognition problem. Pingo acknowledged the issue and said it was working on a fix. Another reviewer requested better support for Traditional Chinese, while other feedback discusses pinyin controls (Pingo does allow you to hide pinyin text btw).

Pricing & plans

When it comes to pricing, Pingo sits somewhere in the middle, depending on the specific price for your region. In my case (september 2026, Germany), it was €79.99 for a yearly subscription, about €10 to €20 cheaper than most other providers. Alternatively, you could opt for a monthly subscription, which is relatively more expensive but doesn’t come with the free trial week.

One key thing to note, however, is that after the one-week free trial, you are immediately charged the full amount for an annual subscription. So, make sure to cancel in time if you don’t want to commit to that.

Personally, I find that trial period very short. You might download the app but not get around to using it right away, and before you know it, you’re locked in, even though you do get a reminder on day five.

How does Pingo handle your personal data?

Living in Germany under the blessings of GDPR (Datenschutz!), we have to take a look at Pingo’s handling of user data (your voice recordings for example).

• Voice recordings + chats are processed to provide the service. Pingo names OpenAI and Groq as AI providers.
• Pingo says these providers may not use your data to train their own models.
• However, Pingo itself may use chats, voice recordings, corrections and feedback to improve/train its AI.
• Data may be processed outside the EU, including the US, using mechanisms such as Standard Contractual Clauses.
• Pingo uses analytics/tracking services including AppsFlyer and Firebase/Google Analytics, collecting device and usage information.
• You can request access, deletion, portability and restriction under GDPR rights.

The bottom line here is probably that for most learners Pingo is fine for ordinary language practice, but you might want to avoid sharing confidential or highly personal information. Even though Pingo supposedly doesn’t allow user data to be used by OpenAI or Groq for training purposes, it does allow the use of conversations/voice data for its own AI improvement.

Not optimised enough to become a daily user

My experiences with Pingo didn’t convince me enough to sign up for an annual subscription. I lost patience with the AI ​​tutor fairly quickly. I was put off by the repetitive drill-style teaching method and monotonous content, and I found it frustrating each time the recording cut off when I stumbled over a sentence.

That said, I actually think the concept is strong, and the execution certainly isn’t bad either. However, for me to become a daily user, further optimization is needed to make the AI tutor behave like an actual language tutor that knows how to adjust to learners’ needs.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. Try the free trial period yourself if you want to find out whether Pingo is the AI tutor you’ve been looking for. I’d be curious to hear about your experiences.

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