About SpeakPass
Last updated: 18 October 2026.
What it is
SpeakPass is a practice room for the speaking tests people in the UK take for settlement and citizenship. From 26 March 2027 indefinite leave to remain on the family route and most work routes needs English at B2, speaking and listening only. The test most people will sit is Trinity GESE Grade 7. SpeakPass runs that exam with an AI examiner, by voice, in the real format and the real timings, and gives a report that says which letter each phase would get and why. The B1 exam (GESE Grade 5) is here too, for citizenship and the routes that stay at B1.
A four-minute conversation practice is free with no account. The full timed mock is free once with an account and then sold in packs. Nothing is a subscription.
Who runs it
Avlas Digital, a registered business name (No. 793798, Companies Registration Office, Ireland), Park House, The Square, Claremorris, Co. Mayo, F12 HE97, Ireland. Email hello@speakpass.co.uk. The site was built in 2026 for the HC 1691 change by a small team in Ireland. We are independent: no connection to the Home Office, UK Visas and Immigration, Trinity College London, LanguageCert, PSI or any test centre. We sell no exams and issue no certificates.
How the examiner works
The examiner is a speech model running on Microsoft Azure in the EU. It hears your voice directly, not a transcript of it, and talks back in real time. Its script follows the GESE Grade 7 or Grade 5 exam as Trinity describes it: the same phases in the same order, the examiner’s set lines, the six conversation subjects for the grade, and the language functions the grade expects (for Grade 7, for example, past habits, second conditional, advice and possibility). It asks follow-ups the way an examiner does and lets you lead where the exam says you must. When time is up it writes private notes on what it heard: pronunciation, stress, fluency, whether you caught the questions.
How we mark
A second model reads the transcript and the examiner’s notes and writes the report. It marks against Trinity’s published GESE performance descriptors for the grade: communicative effectiveness, grammar, lexis and phonology, with the letters Trinity uses (A distinction, B merit, C pass, D fail). For the full mock each phase gets its own letter and the letters are combined with Trinity’s own conversion table, so two Ds fail the exam whatever the third letter is, as on the day. The report quotes your sentences, shows the correction, and names the one thing to fix first.
The grade is an estimate of how a Trinity examiner would mark that conversation. A real examiner on a real day can differ by a letter. Read a C as “you would scrape this today” and a D as “not yet”, and spend your time on the reasons, not the letter.
Known limits. Speech recognition on a strong accent can garble a few words into something that was never said; the marker is told to trust the examiner’s notes over a transcript that makes no sense, and we check reports for this. The examiner does not see your face and cannot read a Topic Form from paper; in the full mock you type it in first, or the examiner writes it with you from your answers. Audio is never stored, so a report cannot be re-marked from the recording. If a report looks wrong to you, email it to us and we will look at the transcript.
How we check facts
Every guide links to the documents it is built on, and the main ones are below. The rules come from the Immigration Rules, the Statement of Changes and the caseworker guidance, not from news reports. The exam facts come from Trinity’s own publications. Each guide shows the date it was published and the date it was last changed; the dates are taken from the edit history, not typed by hand. When the Home Office or Trinity changes something, the guide changes and the date moves. Our own numbers (how often candidates stop after one sentence, which tenses slip most) come from the practice sessions on this site and are described as such.
- Statement of Changes to the Immigration Rules HC 1691 and its explanatory memorandum (5 March 2026)
- Immigration Rules Appendix KoLL and the knowledge of language and life caseworker guidance
- GOV.UK: Prove your knowledge of English for citizenship and settling
- GOV.UK: Approved Secure English Language Tests and test centres
- Trinity College London: GESE Exam Information booklet and the Guide for Teachers (Intermediate stage)
- Trinity College London: GESE Grade 7 (B2) and Grade 5 (B1) performance descriptors and SELT pages
- Council of Europe: CEFR common reference levels
Found a mistake? Write to hello@speakpass.co.uk with the page and the line. We check the source, correct the page, and the updated date on it moves.
What SpeakPass is not
Not a test centre and not a SELT. A pass here is not a certificate and proves nothing to the Home Office. Not legal advice: immigration rules change, and your case may have details a guide cannot see. Check GOV.UK or a regulated adviser before you apply.
Your data, briefly
Your voice goes to the speech model live and is not kept. We keep the transcript, the examiner notes and the report so you can come back to them. No model is trained on your conversations. The free practice is limited to 1 a day per connection so the room stays open for everyone. The full text is in the privacy policy.