A reminder is easy to ignore, and a ringing phone is not, and that difference is the entire product.
Every app on my phone that wants me to build a habit sends me notifications, and over the years I have developed exactly one habit from them, which is swiping them away without reading them. I don't mean that as a joke about my attention span. The swipe is automatic now. A reminder to practise arrives, some part of you registers that it's ignorable, and it's gone before the sentence inside it ever gets read.
Which is what notifications are for, honestly. The operating system treats them as interruptions of the lowest possible stakes, silent unless you've opted into noise, stacked behind a swipe with everything else. Dismissing one costs nothing and leaves no trace, and you're allowed to do it mid-conversation without anyone thinking you're rude. They're designed so that nothing depends on them. And then we ask them to carry the one thing that only works if you actually do it every day.
Dismissing notifications wasn't something that I take pleasure in, in fact, I disliked that about me. So one time in frustration I think out loud, "why can't someone call me to go through it?". At first it felt like venting, but then I began to think about it. It would be akin to a Personal Trainer session. People want PTs because they provide a sense of accountability. A ring wants an answer while it's still happening. You can leave a notification for later indefinitely, but a call only exists for half a minute or so, and somewhere in that half minute you will make an actual decision about it, answer or decline, and either way it was a decision, something you did rather than something that scrolled past. There are decades of conditioning underneath that. A ringtone means a person wants you right now, and every phone you have ever owned has drilled it in a little deeper.
So that's what Colloquial does with a session. At the time you scheduled, your phone rings, and I mean properly rings: the native incoming-call screen, a caller name, a ringtone, over the lock screen, whether or not the app is even open. (It's a simulated internet call, to be clear. The app says so, the listing says so, and no actual phone line is involved.) You answer it the way you answer anything, and it starts walking you through your deck out loud.
The part that matters most to me is who initiated it. An engagement notification is an app deciding it would like some of your attention today, at a moment its analytics picked. The call comes at a time you chose when you scheduled the session, which makes it a different contract entirely, closer to the reminder for a meeting you agreed to, except it rings like a person. I find appointments with other people easy to keep, because the other person shows up and it would cost me something to leave them standing there. Daily practice never shows up on its own. So the whole design is really just that: make practice show up.
Nothing, and that's deliberate. Decline the call and it goes away, it doesn't ring again two minutes later, and there's no streak that just died in some tally you'd half forgotten you were keeping. I left streaks and badges out of Colloquial entirely, because a streak is borrowed motivation with a cliff at the end, and the day it breaks, the reason to come back goes over the cliff with it. Declining has to be a real, consequence-free option, or answering stops meaning anything. And if the mechanic simply isn't for you, there's a switch in settings that turns the calls off, because something this loud has to be easy to refuse or it's just spam with a ringtone.
There's a practical half to this too. Colloquial's cards are audio, a recorded question and a recorded answer, because the point is training your ears (I've written before about knowing a word perfectly on paper and not recognising it out of someone's mouth). And the posture you're in when you answer a phone call happens to be exactly the posture ear-first practice wants: phone at your ear or on speaker, eyes and hands mostly free. The session asks out loud, you say your answer, the recording of the answer plays, next card. You can do it on a walk or while the pasta boils. If the same session arrived as a notification, you'd tap it and be thumb-deep in a screen again, which is the exact place we were trying to leave.
If you never touch my app, the idea still transfers. Give your practice a slot that interrupts you, an actual alarm with an actual bell at a time you picked, and treat it with the seriousness you'd give a call from a friend, which mostly means answering it. What a habit asks of you matters less than how it arrives. Everything I'd tried before arrived politely, and polite, it turns out, was the problem.
Colloquial is a flashcard app that calls you and walks you through your deck out loud.
See how it works →