Language apps are very good at getting you to recognise words and quite bad at getting you to say any. You can be a long way into one and still freeze the first time somebody actually talks to you.
Voluble is built the other way round. You speak, it listens, it replies out loud in the language with its own voice, and live dual subtitles run underneath so you can see what you both just said. Nothing is scripted — the conversation goes where you take it, pitched to your level and to whatever you actually need the language for.
Around the core loop there is spaced repetition on what you got wrong, streaks, a scenario generator, an email simulator for register and tone, and a sentence builder for construction drills.
It is an Electron app for macOS and it is local-first: SQLite on your machine, API keys in the system keychain, no accounts and no backend. Speech-to-text, the model and the voice are each swappable from Settings across eleven providers, so you bring your own keys and nothing is routed through anything of mine.
Built and shipped on BAEHQ's June 2026 startup programme.