We are currently sitting for our final-year campus placement drives. The pressure in the air is suffocating, but for my closest friend, it has been downright terrifying.
She comes from a rural vernacular background. In our computer science labs, she is a rockstar—her code is elegant, her logic is sharp, and her problem-solving skills put most of us to shame. But the moment she has to speak in English, her voice trembles.
A few weeks ago, she took an automated AI assessment required by an visiting tech company. She knew every single answer. But when the results came back, she was rejected. The machine flagged her response as "unclear" simply because of her regional accent and vowel shifts—saying "tablet" like "toblet" or "WhatsApp" as "whyatsup".
She came back to the hostel room, sat down quietly, and said: "I know the answers, but my mouth just fails me. Maybe corporate isn't for people like me."
That broke my heart.
Our college gave us access to a commercial communication training tool, but it made her anxiety ten times worse. It dumped a cold, robotic score like "Fluency: 58/100" without telling her which specific words were wrong or how to shape her mouth to say them correctly. It felt like being graded by a wall.
Naive AI wrappers don't help either—Speech-to-Text models like Whisper automatically "autocorrect" mispronunciations into perfect text, causing standard LLMs to hallucinate fake errors when they can't actually hear the audio.
I promised her I would build something better: a safe, private, non-judgmental space that actually hears acoustic speech variations, gives gentle phonetic guidance, and never leaves her laptop.
Placement Pronunciation Coach is an acoustic-backed, locally-run AI speech evaluation dashboard designed specifically for students facing interview anxiety.
word_timestamps=True to extract per-word confidence probabilities (< 0.75 threshold) to catch where speech clarity drops.g2p_en): pyttsx3) for target words so candidates can listen to clean model pronunciations and repeat them immediately.
💡 Real-Time Feedback: The system highlights speech confidence scores, breaks down mispronounced words phonetically, and plays back clean reference audio—all running 100% locally.
Example Feedback: When practicing technical sentences, the tool flags low-confidence words, provides simple syllable breakdowns, and plays back the target sound without judging the speaker.
When you're terrified of mispronouncing words, up your vulnerable voice recordings to a cloud server or a paid API feels terrifying:
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/triveniko/placement-pronunciation-coach