ELSA Speak: English Learning

I used Elsa to practice for an English verification test in my school. My goal at first was to pass this test but then I fell in love with the app and with continuously improving my prononciation. The free version is limited but not bad at all. However, when you advance in your learning, you may want to spend more time and do more lessons per day so the Pro membership is really worth the price. Now I am on Lifetime Pro Membership and it is GREAT! Elsa provides a lot of topic that were not familiar with me while in an English class. Now I can talk about them more confidently than before and I am glad I can share my ideas clearly. I also use the speech analyzer sometimes and it is really helpful. I always recommend ELSA to any friends wanting to learn English. Thank you for designing the app! I will be very happy if you will come up with ELSA for other popular languages like spanish, french or german. It is so life changing.

To be honest, the accuracy of the app doesn’t work as what they advertise (sometimes u just need to pretend to read like an elementary school student rather than a native adult), but what really frustrated me was their subscription price inconsistency. I bought yearly subscription in app by $117, but when I checked my account at apple, there is a $40 yearly subscription choice. So I paid like 3 times to get a subscription which is a joke. I tried to switch myself to $40 which works but also cancelled my previous $117 subscription — so I paid total $157. What’s worse, they also provide $98 for “lifetime” subscription, which is cheaper than in app purchase to upgrade your Pro subscription. When I wrote the letter to reflect the issue, they just said I can only pay $117, and refuse to let me use $98 for lifetime. Unless I just spend “additional $98”. The whole conversation process with customer support just made me even more frustrated because Elsa doesn’t own the responsibility of the price inconsistency (we are not taking about $20 dollar gap but 3 times around $90 dollar gap). They just want you to pay as high as possible and hide certain information from customers. I don’t mind paying at all. But I refuse to be an idiot.

I bought Elsa and paid for one year subscription (75 dollars) via Apple Pay. A few days later, Elsa system automatically charged me 25 dollars for three-month subcription and switched my subscription status from Annual Membership to Quaterly Membership. It was so annoying because I myself made the choice of one year subscription when I paid for it at first. When I contacted Elsa customer service, a Vietnamese staff (admin of Elsa fanpage) said that it was a mistake and they would refund me within 7-10 days via Paypal. However, they changed their minds quickly and threw me a form to ask for refund directly from Apple Pay. Another Customer Service staff also said they were not sure if Apple Pay would refund me or not. Nearly a week later, I got no reply from Apple Pay. I contacted Elsa and got no reply as well. I just wanted to know what was going on, what was needed to be done and who was responsible for it. I didn't mean to ask for a refund immediately. Although this was a mistake from Elsa charging system, they kept ignoring the problem and asked me to go ask for refund from a third party. What's their Customer Service for? I bought several apps before but have never experienced such charging policy and customer service. I feel like after I paid for Elsa, I was left alone when problems arose. Speaking of the usefullness of the app itself, it can help you detect pronuciation problems (American accent) but cannot show you ways to improve. In other words, you need a mentor to guide, to show you measures, and Elsa can be merely used as an evaluating tool.