I am not a developer. I have never written software for a living. What I had, a few weeks ago, was a very specific frustration: I wanted to practice for the IELTS with realistic tests and honest feedback, and every site I opened either hid the good part behind a paywall, drowned me in ads, or graded my writing with a score and nothing else. So one morning I decided to stop looking and start building, and the only tool I really trusted to help me was an AI I could talk to like a colleague.
This is the story of how ParrotTalk went from an idea in my head to a working IELTS practice site, told honestly, including the parts that broke. If you are preparing for the exam, I think how a tool is built tells you something about whether you can trust it.
Day one: a whole platform in a single day
On the very first day, working in a long back and forth with an AI, I got further than I expected. By the end of that day there was a real prototype covering all four IELTS sections: Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking. It had the parrot mascots that give the site its name, an early Reading module, writing that came back with a score, and even a first attempt at Speaking practice where you record your voice and get feedback.
It was rough. It was also real, and clickable, and mine. That first day taught me the most important lesson of the whole project: the bottleneck was never the code. The bottleneck was knowing exactly what a good IELTS practice session should feel like, and being honest about the distance between that and what I had actually built.
The honesty pass
A few days in, I did something that probably shaped the site more than any feature. I went through every page and stripped out anything that was not strictly true. Marketing language has a way of creeping in on its own: a claim here, a promise there. I removed it all.
Out went any wording that oversold what the AI could do. In came a plain disclaimer that ParrotTalk is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge English, because it is not, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. I made the decision that the site would be 100% free, and I wrote the privacy and terms pages properly instead of faking them.
I called it the honesty pass. It sounds small. It was the moment ParrotTalk stopped being a demo and started being something I would put my own name on.
Moving from a toy to a real engine
The early version faked more than I was comfortable with. So the next step was to build a real backend for the AI feedback, a small server that sits between the site and the model, keeps the keys safe, controls costs, and returns a clean evaluation for Writing and Speaking. I asked the AI to review its own work critically, caught a batch of mistakes that way, and rebuilt the parts that were held together with tape.
None of this was glamorous. A lot of it was me describing a bug in plain English, reading the explanation back, and asking why the fix did not hold. But slowly the site stopped being a set of screens and became a system that behaved the same way twice in a row.
The bug that mattered most
If I had to point to one fix that made ParrotTalk usable, it would not be a flashy feature. It would be progress that does not disappear.
In an early version, if you were halfway through a Listening or Reading test and the page reloaded, your answers were gone. For a real candidate practicing at night after work, that is not a minor annoyance, it is a reason to close the tab and never come back. Fixing it properly, so your progress is saved and restored automatically the moment you return, took real care. It was the least visible work and the most important.
Rebuilding Listening to feel like the real thing
The section I am proudest of rebuilding is Listening. The first version played audio and asked questions, and that was about it. The real IELTS Listening test has a rhythm: a narrator, questions that reveal in sync with what you hear, no way to skip ahead. So I rebuilt the whole module to follow that rhythm as faithfully as I could, with the narration and the on-screen reveal moving together, across four full tests, tuned to be a notch harder so the real exam feels no worse.
That is the pattern of the entire project. Build the honest version, use it, notice exactly where it does not match reality, rebuild that part. Over and over.
Why I am building this in the open
I believe an IELTS tool earns trust by being verifiable, not by shouting. That is the whole reason for this journal. I would rather show you the one-day prototype, the honesty pass and the bug that nearly sank the Listening module than hand you a glossy pitch. If the AI feedback gives you a band estimate, you deserve to know it is an estimate, produced by a model, not an official result.
Today ParrotTalk is a working, 100% free IELTS practice site. You can sit a full IELTS mock test under real exam conditions, or, when you only have an hour, take the Quick Test that covers all four sections quickly. Both are free, and both exist because I wanted them to exist and could not find them anywhere else.
Try it yourself. Start with a full mock test and see where you stand, honestly.
This is the first entry in the journal. In the next ones I will get specific: how the free mock test is put together, how the AI writing checker actually reads a Task 2 essay, and what I have learned about IELTS band scoring by trying to make a machine do it fairly. Thanks for reading, and good luck with your exam.
If you want to see where all this ended up, start with the free IELTS Listening test.