You can practise a full IELTS Speaking test online with ParrotTalk, free, with an AI examiner that scores you on the four official criteria. Real people, though, do not answer in the neat order a developer imagines, and making the Speaking module survive that was a small saga worth telling.
When I first built Speaking, I tested it the way its maker always does: politely. Question one, record, question two, record, all the way through, like a well-behaved robot. Then a friend tried it and did what real people do. They skipped a question they did not like. They went back to redo an earlier one. They stopped halfway to think. And a few things quietly fell over.
Building for how people really behave
The worst bug was the sneaky kind. If you skipped ahead, an answer could end up matched to the wrong question, so your brilliant response to part two got judged as if it answered part three. On paper the test still passed. In practice the feedback was quietly nonsense. I had to make the module keep a firm link between each question and the exact audio you recorded for it, no matter what order you jumped around in.
Then there was the messy input problem. Speech gets transcribed, and transcription is never perfectly tidy: a recording cuts off, the text comes back half-formed, the response the model returns is sometimes truncated mid-thought. Early on, any of those could break the whole result. Now each of them is caught and handled gently, so a rough recording gives you a slightly rougher estimate instead of an error screen.
Why the untidy cases matter most
None of this is glamorous, and none of it is visible when everything goes right. But the untidy cases are not edge cases at all. They are just Tuesday. People are tired, distracted, unsure, and a tool that only works for the tidy user is not really finished.
The payoff is that Speaking practice now holds up when you use it like a human being, not a test script. Skip a part, come back to it, re-record the one that went badly. It will keep up, and you will still get an honest band on all four criteria at the end. It is free, and it works in a normal mobile browser.
The short version: ParrotTalk's Speaking practice survives skipping, redoing and messy recordings, and still gives you an honest band on the four criteria. Free, no sign-up.
I learned the same lesson I keep relearning on this project: build for the real person in front of the screen, not the imaginary one who does everything in order.